I've p.masked dev-libs/publib and it's pending removal in a week from now if 
nobody says anything.

This library was added in 2002 but seems like nothing is actually making use 
of it anyway. Some of the functions are broken. There's no more an active 
upstream, and the Debian patches we're using are unmaintained, too.
It could have been used to provide missing functions on non-glibc systems, but 
it's difficult to handle, and GNULib[1] can be used instead (it's not in 
portage, but if it will ever needed by Gentoo/ALT projects I can add it to 
gentoo-alt overlay and then to the main portage when needed.

publib was added for the pure sake of it, without a required dependency. It 
seems not to be used by anything useful at the moment.

I'd rather avoid having a dead piece of code lying around and maybe screwing 
things around.

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://dev.gentoo.org/~flameeyes/
Gentoo/ALT lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, AMD64, Sound, PAM, KDE