Mart Raudsepp

So the long-awaited (sorry about that) GNOME-2.18 has gone stable on most of architectures now. I would like to remind the GNOME-2.18 Upgrade Guide, which I also updated half an hour ago for some minor corrections. As Daniel already noted you better upgrade with revdep-rebuild -X as this ought to fix expat breakage and upgrade GNOME/KDE at the same time, reducing pain.
I would use revdep-rebuild -X -- -va myself to see what it will do
If still some pain happens, especially related to intltool, you might want to rebuild sys-devel/gettext and dev-perl/XML-Parser manually as the first thing and do a revdep-rebuild -X again, if it didn't order them first otherwise.

Now that GNOME-2.18 is stable, cleaning up of GNOME-2.14 from the tree is ongoing. This also means that linux kernel 2.4 subprofiles will loose all GNOME versions, which hopefully isn't a problem because I can't imagine why any desktop would use linux-2.4 still.
Someone please kill off these subprofiles completely, pretty please

For the short-term future my plan is to get some more 2.18.3 version bumps in and stable all the remaining 2.18 updates soon too, which shouldn't be a too big amount of packages. Also 2.20 is upon us soon, for which we will create action plans and take other measures to not slip with unmasking and stabling this time around. 2.19 is having a good life in the gnome-experimental overlay meanwhile, of course. We also have two new team members (hi!) rocking along and helping out a lot and covering times when me and/or Daniel are too busy with work, so the future looks good.
Stay tuned for some GNOME related public comment requests in some days