Upstream repository shutdowns

This article is Article description::used to list deprecated (or simply no longer existent) locations for upstream package repositories. At one time Gentoo ebuild maintainers were able to download source tarballs for packages from these sites. Now that they are no longer usable, ebuild maintainers have the difficult job up tracking down where the upstream projects have decided to move their project repositories.

The broken SRC_URI values in the official Gentoo tree generate a lot of maintenance work.

Security
Many projects got forked several times during the shut down procedure and it is not always easy to find out which fork is the right one for the Gentoo ebuild.

While many packages need an update to a new URL it is easy to plant silently a link to malicious source code instead of the original source code. It is also possible that a developer uses a wrong fork by accident.

Developers should read also the How to deal with package forks? discussion as started on 2017-03-09 on the developer mailing list.

Mirrors
Find out, if there sources on example.com which we must not mirror

Returns all RESTRICT variables of the affected ebuilds. Are they using restrictions which would forbid mirroring in general?

Note about mirror://gentoo from devmanual "Previous policy was to use mirror://gentoo directly, but this is now deprecated, as that wouldn't allow to have long-term availability and traceability of the source files, which might be a requirement of the license. "

Fixing a package

 * If there is no suitable upstream HOMEPAGE use  as a substitute.

Notable repositories that were shut down

 * 2014-04-30: BerliOS shut down (70 ebuilds affected)
 * 2015-05-31: gitorious.org shut down (26 ebuilds affected)
 * 2015-05-31: codehaus.org shut down (40 ebuilds affected)
 * 2016-03-31: JavaForge shut down (2 ebuilds affected)
 * 2016-12-31: Google Code shut down (500+ ebuilds affected)
 * 2017-03-01: Fedorahosted.org shut down (107 ebuilds affected)
 * 2017-05-16: gna.org shut down (88 ebuilds affected)