Recently the mobile herd got a request for a driver to be included on the livecd that has not been marked stable yet because it is new. Current policy says that a driver has to be stable to be included on the livecd. Current policy also says that a driver has to be in the tree for 30 days to be marked stable.
Now the problem is, that many new drivers do not get included on the livecd and many people have to use non-gentoo-livecds to intall their gentoo operating systems. This situation will not change for 2005.0 if the snapshot is to be taken in <1 month. Waiting for 2006.0 as the next stable livecd is a really long time.
However, as the releng team is really loaded with work, it does not seem possible to regularly get experimental livecds with new drivers or new driver-versions on them. A smart way to solve this is to put the drivers as binaries on an usb-key, precompiled for the livecd environment. I will consider putting some drivers precompiled for the 2005.1 livecd on my devspace when there is increasing demand for it after it has been released. Oh, and thanks to John for the idea 🙂