Six months ago, the GNOME team was able to provide GNOME 2.8 packages for experimental the day it was released. I guess people expected the same would happen for 2.10...

Well, no. We haven't started serious work on creating GNOME 2.10 packages for unstable, not even experimental. Right now, we're trying to stabilise the uploads done to sync unstable/testing with the GNOME 2.8.3 release, which happened a few weeks ago. A few buildd's haven't catched up or need to retry some libs due to missing build-deps. We're also trying to finish up the non-howl transition. It should be solved pretty soonish, and nothing should stop us from starting to work on 2.10 as soon as this weekend.

When we start, it won't take too long, because fortunately seb128 has done most of the work for Hoary, so for most tarballs it'll be a matter of syncing. Be prepared to use external repositories, though, as GNOME 2.10 includes a few new modules like gnome-menus which would trigger NEW and would probably take weeks to appear in the archive. I assume we'll use the pkg-gnome repository as we did for 2.6, until we can move to either experimental or unstable, once Sarge freezes.

What is pretty clear, just if you're wondering, is that Debian Sarge will not release with GNOME 2.10. We know this was said for 2.6 and 2.8 in the past, but this time it appears the freeze is actually close. We'll stick with GNOME 2.8.3 for the release, although it wouldn't be surprising if we end up offering a semi-official backport for Sarge in pkg-gnome.

Oh, last but not least, congrats to all the GNOME folks for another rocking and successful release!