Project:Treecleaner

Gentoo currently has a number of packages that lack maintainers and are broken in one or more ways. Due to the large number of packages that exhibit this behavior in the gentoo package database the tree cleaner subproject was created. The overall goal of this subproject is to reduce the number of unmaintained and broken packages in the tree. This is accomplished by either finding a maintainer for the package, fixing the package, or removing the package from the package database.

We aim to make less work for everyone by reducing the number of broken and unmaintained packages in the tree. We also aim to increase the user experience by removing broken packages from the tree; therefore users have less hair-raising experiences with packages in-tree that just don't work.

Goals
To find and remove broken and unmaintained packages from the tree.

Orphaned packages
Packages that do not have an active maintainer to take care of them are marked as maintainer-needed. This means that they will rot or be removed from the main Gentoo repository unless someone steps up to take care of them. You are free to do it yourself if you feel like it. Gentoo developers and users are encouraged to pick up maintenance for maintainer-needed packages. Users can become maintainers for packages via the Project:Proxy_Maintainers process.

The Treecleaner project maintains a list of orphaned (aka maintainer-needed) packages. Feel free to grab and maintain one if you want to.

Git history / CVS Attic
All ebuilds, including deleted ones, are available from the web interface to Gentoo's ebuild repository:
 * all development work done in git (i.e. since 9 Aug 2015) is available at: https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/;
 * preceding ebuild history (done in CVS) is available at: http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo-x86/;
 * alternatively, the git conversion of the CVS history is available at: https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo/historical.git/; however, note that it is imperfect and some parts are missing.

If you know the package name, the easiest way to find the past package versions is to look at git log for the specific directory, e.g.:

For CVS, the removed files appear in the Attic. They can be accessed by clicking the (Show  dead files) link at the top of the folder view.

You can then download any ebuilds you may need from gitweb/ViewCVS and place them in a local overlay, where they can be installed as normal. Any distribution files will remain on Gentoo's mirrors for at least two weeks after the ebuild is removed from the tree, and even after removal from our mirrors they will in most cases continue to be available from the original source.

But I love that package!
We are glad you like that package, however without a maintainer it sits stale in the tree. Maintaining a package involves a time commitment, even if your ebuild you submitted to Bugzilla works, or the patch works, it takes time fixing other bugs, testing the package, checking for updates, and so on. Sometimes there is no one to take this responsibility. If you are confident there are enough users for the package, feel free to contact the Project:Proxy_Maintainers team for assistance.

Policy
Policies can be found in the policy article.