It's not, and I see nobody complaining it is. I've seen 1 Gentoo guy tell me that we were late (before he checked and realized he had nothing better than 2.6.19) and don't remember other complaints.Plenty of people complain that our Etch kernel is outdated,
I'm not sure what you're suggesting. If you're suggesting that the release announcement talks specifically about Linux, I disagree. Linux wasn't frozen longer than base (and actually, it got an unusual freeze exception during base's freeze). If you're suggesting to explain why base packages are older, I doubt I'd agree - we could have done that with Sarge, but Etch's software is not particularly old.but we don't tell them that a quality enterprise-grade kernel _requires_ long stabilisation and testing. (One of our direct competitor distributions, RHEL 5, released two weeks before us and also bases their kernel on 2.6.18.)