OpenRC, the replacement for Gentoo's current services system (known as baselayout), will be stabilized on May 8. It replaces the previous bash-only rc system in baselayout with an rc system that has a C-based core and uses only POSIX-compliant shell code.

You will see an update for sys-apps/baselayout to 2.x and a new package, sys-apps/openrc. It is recommended that you perform this update as soon as possible.

After these packages are emerged, it is absolutely critical that you immediately update your configuration files with dispatch-conf, etc-update or a similar tool then follow the steps in the OpenRC Migration Guide.

Failure to follow all of these steps will result in an unbootable system. If that happens, you will need to boot from a LiveCD or LiveDVD, mount your root filesystem, chroot into that environment and follow the above steps.

Christian Faulhammer and William Hubbs contributed this announcement.