"In what will likely prove to be a controversial decision, Portage 2.1 will adopt the RPM format for all packages moving forward. The use of ebuilds will be deprecated in favor of the defacto RPM standard. The primary driver for this decision was to ensure compliance with the Linux Standard Base specification, which mandates RPM support for package management.
"The developers have been hard at work to make this migration as easy as possible. Already a proof-of-concept ebuild2rpm script is in place and being tested by a pilot group of developers. Unfortunately, because of the architectural differences between the two formats, some features will not be supported once Gentoo moves to RPM. USE variables are one such feature; sandbox security is another. However, the added benefit brought about by full LSB compliance should far outweigh the loss of these two minor features..."
