"For some Linux distribution projects, new releases come twice a year. That had been the plan for Gentoo Linux this year, until it canceled its current planned release -- the second time it's done so in the past 12 months.
"But the news doesn't necessarily mean a setback for the project.
"Instead, Gentoo developers said they are pushing a new model for their distribution -- one that eschews the conventional release wisdom used by Red Hat, Novell, Debian and others. Instead of fixed releases, Gentoo is promoting its vision of a live, continuously updating distribution. In practice, that effort revolves around its weekly minimal images, which are then supplemented with customized installed packages.
"'We need to work harder to communicate the relative irrelevance of releases in a live distribution like Gentoo,' Gentoo developer Donnie Berkholz explained to InternetNews.com. Releases 'have an overly large impact on what non-Gentoo users think of the health of the distribution, so problems with a small team within Gentoo are magnified in their effect on public opinion.'
