All,
We were without power for 4 days due to a snowstorm, and what's worse, my Linux partitions broke down when the power went out, so now I have to reinstall the system from scratch. There was no loss of my personal data (thanks to backups), but I lost all of my development environment and now I have to compile again all the latest glib, gtk, gtkmm, sigc++, boehm...
So, as you can guess I was really disappointed to still not find a static package on SF. Right now I would be in an ideal situation to test it, being on a system with very limited libraries installed. I start to grow tired from repeating this, but WE NEED PACKAGES, and most importantly we need a static build. That's a prerequisite for the release. The longer we don't have it, the longer the release will be delayed.
By not providing binaries now we not only get a poorly tested release, but the binaries _after_ the release will likely be slow to appear, even slower than for 0.39. That's because packagers need time and effort to set up the environment with all the new libraries. So, by doing some binaries now, we'll ensure prompt binary builds when 0.40 is out, which is important from the marketing point of view.