One of the things that lately became more and more important for Gentoo, IMHO, is the lack of an x86 team. As the time goes by, amd64 desktops are getting more and more used, and this is good, IMHO, because a lot of software bad coded is not working there, removing a lot of cruft from the packages base users are going to have (am I referring to Helix Player? well not exactly but that’s one of them).
Unfortunately one of the things that this is making clear is that we need an x86 team as many devs (like me) are getting access only to amd64 hardware so can’t test and mark for x86 systems.
Also if this can seem a problem not exactly extended, at the time of writing I have marked stable a couple of packages (xine-lib and libtorrent/rtorrent) which aren’t stable on x86.. instead of an amd64-imlate.txt file (which shows which packages are stable on x86 but not on amd64) this time we need an x86-imlate.txt.
It can seem a little problem but consider that, just myself, I’m maintaining 13 packages, and I’m on media-video, sound and pam herds (and also az who’s the other main pam developer uses amd64 as main arch). This means that 13 + eventual packages that I mark stable on media-video, sound and pam are going to be marked amd64 before x86.
Add to that the other devs in my same situation and we’re going to have more than a few packages maintained on just amd64.