Re: [gentoo-dev] Removals reply

[Vaeth <vaeth@mathematik.uni-wuerzburg.de>]

> [...] and if anyone wants to start where we left he
> can pick out the ebuild from attic and put into his own overlay where
> it might work for him or even put it back to tree fixed.

And this is exactly what *cannot* be done after a while:

The ebuild is still available by CVS (or maybe git in future),
but if there were already a lot of gentoo patches, the tarball with these
patches is lost forever.  If even upstream is dead, not even the main
tarball will be available anymore.

> Go for it, i wrote exactly what to do, create vcs/tracker/homepage and 
> it can stay.

And what if somebody decides to do so in a year?
E.g. if somebody gets some hardware in a year and needs support of
a package which was removed?
Or if he was not yet a gentoo user at the time when the package was
removed (or absent/busy for a long period)?

Then he is lost unless a distribution with bigger resources as gentoo
has decided to keep the package. Not really a selling point for gentoo.