Project:Treecleaner

The Tree Cleaning Team is primarily concerned with removing unmaintained and broken packages from the tree. 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.

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

Orphaned packages
Packages which do not have an active maintainer to take care of them are marked as maintainer-needed. This means that they will gonna rot or be removed from portage tree unless someone steps up and take care of them. You are free to do it your self 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.

CVS Attic
All ebuilds, including deleted ones, are available from the web interface to Gentoo's CVS repository, which you can find at http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo-x86/. Ebuilds and directories that have been removed will appear in the Attic, and 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 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!
I'm 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 your 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 resposibility on. If you are confident there are enough users for the package, feel free to contact the Project:Proxy_Maintainers team and hopefully they will be able to help you.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the following authors and editors for their contributions to this guide:


 * Alec Warner
 * Charlie Shepherd
 * Markos Chandras
 * scarabeus