News (mainly features/major bug fixes)

portage-2.1 (ongoing via pre releases)
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* FEATURES="confcache" integration; global caching to speed up configure calls, 
  requires dev-util/confcache
* elog framework and accompanying modules for logging ebuild warnings, errors
  and general notices. Collects eerror/ewarn/elog/einfo messages.
* New elog function (should replace einfo in many cases)
* version syntax enhancements allowing multiple suffixes and a new 'cvs'
  prefix for denoting "live sources" ebuilds.
* config files as directories enabling more flexible settings management.
* Addition of an register_die_hook method that allows ebuild/eclasses to
  register functions to be called for better debugging on errors.
* Addition of pre and post user hookable functions for each ebuild phase, accessible 
  via portage bashrc.  Example would be pre_src_unpack .
* cache refactoring- runtime improvement from 35% -> 65%.
* Intelligently handle and display USE_EXPAND-based IUSE variables.
* FEATURES="parallel-fetch".  Download in parallel to compilation.
* Include a "changed or new" USE flag output when --verbose isn't specified.
* Support for splitting out debug information into separate files in
  /usr/lib{,32,64}.
* exec subsystem refactoring (now with less bugs!)
* Added sha256 and rmd160 hashes for digests/manifests
* Make --emptytree only apply to ${ROOT} rather than always including /.
* Allow packages to be upgraded that are only depended on via a
  "|| ( =cat/pkg-1* =cat/pkg-2* )" construct.
* Ebuild output is no longer cut off early when using PORT_LOGDIR.
* Distfiles indirection- $DISTFILES access goes through a tmp dir to fail
  access to files not listed in SRC_URI.
* Emerge now uses --resume to restart itself after portage upgrade.
* Atomic file updates via the new atomic_ofstream class.
* Global updates and fixpackages performance optimizations.
* Tests show that file locking is now more reliable.
* A bash call stack is printed when an ebuild dies in ebuild.sh.
* New rsync option handling by using a generic PORTAGE_RSYNC_EXTRA_OPTS variable
* Manifest2 support that will allow digest-* files to be eliminated from the tree.