Release Engineering ("releng") is the official Gentoo project focused on coordinating and improving the creation of official media releases of Gentoo Linux and other Gentoo operating systems. It is also primarily responsible for many of the tools used by the installation process, including catalyst, genkernel, and the Gentoo Linux Installer.
The goals of Release Engineering are to continually improve the quality, timeliness and overall procedures for creating official Gentoo Linux releases, as well as acting as the official coordinators for creating new Gentoo Linux release media. This project is very much focused on ensuring that the initial quality of every official release is as high as possible, and that the "from CD" experience is as positive for as many of our users as possible.
| Developer | Nickname | Role |
| Andrew Gaffney | agaffney | Lead ( Team Lead and x86 Release Coordinator ) |
| Christoph Mende | angelos | Member ( AMD64 Release Coordinator ) |
| Raúl Porcel | armin76 | Member ( IA64/SPARC Release Coordinator ) |
| Tobias Scherbaum | dertobi123 | Member ( HPPA Release Coordinator ) |
| Mike Doty | kingtaco | Member ( AMD64 Release Co-Coordinator ) |
| Tobias Klausmann | klausman | Member ( Alpha Release Coordinator ) |
| Joshua Kinard | kumba | Member ( MIPS Release Coordinator ) |
| Joshua Saddler | nightmorph | Member ( Documentation Liaison ) |
| Peter Volkov | pva | Member ( Security Liaison ) |
| Brent Baude | ranger | Member ( PowerPC Release Coordinator ) |
| Stuart Longland | redhatter | Member ( MIPS Stages ) |
| Robin H. Johnson | robbat2 | Member ( Infrastructure Liaison ) |
| Ben de Groot | yngwin | Member ( PR Liaison ) |
All developers can be reached by e-mail using nickname@gentoo.org.
The releng project has the following subprojects:
| Project | Lead | Description |
| Catalyst | This project develops the catalyst tool, which is used to build official Gentoo stage tarballs, PackageCD and InstallCD and LiveCD images. | |
| Installer | Preston Cody | The Gentoo Installer project aims to create a widely extensible install engine that allows for a diverse set of attended and un-attended install options. |
| Releng/QA Hardware | Release Engineering maintains its own set of hardware for development, testing and release building, as well as the porting of Gentoo Linux to new architectures. Currently, this hardware consists of a dual-CPU 900Mhz zx6000 Itanium 2 system with 4GB of RAM on extended loan from HP, and a dual Opteron AMD64 system built from parts donated by AMD, NVIDIA, The Gentoo Foundation, and the Gentoo/AMD64 project. All systems are running Gentoo Linux. Access to these is currently restricted to Release Engineering members. For other developer hardware, check out the dev machines page. |
All release media will have its DIGESTS file signed by one of the Gentoo Linux Release Engineering (releng@gentoo.org) PGP keys listed on this page. The keys are available through the subkeys.pgp.net keyserver. They can be used to verify that the media is, in fact, the media shipped by Release Engineering and not from a potential attacker. You will find more detailed verification instructions in the handbooks for each release.
New keys and changes to existing keys will be announced to the following Gentoo mailing lists: gentoo-dev-announce, gentoo-announce, gentoo-core.
Note: Releases up to and including 2007.0 had PGP signatures directly on top of the files. This required large quantities of disk IO for generation on the servers, and validation on the client side. As such, as of the 2008.0 release, the DIGESTS file is now signed instead, making verification a two-step process, but overall much quicker. |
Code Listing 5.1: Obtaining the public key |
$ gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys <key id>
|
Code Listing 5.2: Verify the cryptographic signature |
$ gpg --verify <foo.DIGESTS.asc>
|
Code Listing 5.3: Verify the checksum |
$ sha1sum -c <foo.DIGESTS.asc>
|
| Key ID | Key Type | Key Fingerprint | Key Description | Created | Expires | Revoked | Notes |
| 0x239C75C4 | 1024-bit DSA | AE54 54F9 67B5 6AB0 9AE1 6064 0838 C26E 239C 75C4 | Gentoo Portage Snapshot Signing Key (Automated Signing Key) | 2007/11/25 | 2011/11/24 | ||
| 0x17072058 | 1024-bit DSA | D99E AC73 79A8 50BC E47D A5F2 9E64 38C8 1707 2058 | Gentoo Linux Release Engineering (Gentoo Linux Release Signing Key) | 2004/07/20 | 2016/08/13 | Non-automated. | |
| 0x2D182910 | 4096-bit RSA | 13EB BDBE DE7A 1277 5DFD B1BA BB57 2E0E 2D18 2910 | Gentoo Linux Release Engineering (Automated Weekly Release Key) | 2009/08/25 | 2013/08/24 | ||
| 0xD8BA32AA | 1024-bit DSA | 8861 8228 9048 D40B 3C3B ADDA 6DC2 26AA D8BA 32AA | Gentoo Portage Snapshot Signing Key (Automated Signing Key) | 2004/11/11 | 2005/11/11 | 2007/11/25 | Revoked for changeover |
| 0x7DDAD20D | 1024-bit DSA | 4AC0 D5FE 8F92 96BA 6A06 0A2A BB1D 301B 7DDA D20D | Gentoo Portage Snapshot Signing Key (Automated Signing Key) | 2005/11/23 | 2007/11/23 | 2007/11/25 | Revoked for changeover |
The latest release of Gentoo Linux is:
Gentoo Linux 2008.0 for Alpha, AMD64, HPPA, IA64, MIPS, PPC, SPARC, and x86 architectures.
Note: These are estimated dates. Actual release dates may vary. |
| Date | Version | Phase |
| Jul 2008 | 2008.0 | Released, Release Information, Press Release |
| Sep 2008 | 2008.1 | Cancelled |
| Date | Version | Phase |
| Dec 2007 | 2007.1 | Cancelled, Release Information, Press Release |
| May 2007 | 2007.0 | Released, Release Information, Press Release |
| Aug 2006 | 2006.1 | Released, Release Information, Press Release |
| Feb 2006 | 2006.0 | Released, Release Information, Press Release |
| Aug 2005 | 2005.1 | Released, Release Information, Press Release |
| Mar 2005 | 2005.0 | Released, Release Information, Press Release |
| November 2004 | 2004.3 | Released, Release Information, Press Release |
| July 2004 | 2004.2 | Released, Release Information, Press Release |
| April 2004 | 2004.1 | Released, Release Information, Press Release |
| February 2004 | 2004.0 | Released, Release Information, Press Release |
| Sept 2003 | 1.4 maintenance release 1 | Released |
| July 2003 | 1.4 | Released |
Note: Releases prior to 1.4 were before this project's existence. |