Even in this short period of time, I've hit several things that prevented or delayed a package from becoming stable. I think it's a good idea to warn people before rather than after, so if you want your package to become stable, please watch out for any of these:
- unstable dependencies; just file bugs for these first
- failing tests; you should be running with FEATURES="test" all the time to catch these
- upstream considering the version experimental; why should we consider it stable then? There are exceptions to this rule however if older versions are unmaintained.
- open bugs for the package
- repoman warnings for the package, or QA concerns on manual ebuild inspection (like not calling die on emake failure)
- requiring the user to do manual configuration that could be instead performed automatically that if not done prevents the package from working completely
One more note: does every minor version bump need to get stabilized?