Gentoo Tree Cleaning Team

1.  Project Description

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.

2.  Project Goals

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

3.  Developers

All developers can be reached by e-mail using nickname@gentoo.org.

4.  Recruitment

We are currently looking for users interested in helping the project with the following jobs:

"Ghostbusters"

Job description

Our project is understaffed. We are constantly looking for users and developers to assist us in identifying broken and unmaintained packages on portage tree

Requirements

Candidates must be familiar with Bugzilla and portage tree structure. Experience with portage tools ( equery, etc ) is also a plus

Contact

treecleaner@gentoo.org

5.  Contact

The TreeCleaner project is available at treecleaner@gentoo.org

6.  Orphaned packages

Removing a package isn't the only solution offered by the tree cleaner project. The Treecleaner Project maintains a list of orphaned (aka maintainer-needed) packages. Feel free to grab and maintain one if you want to.

7.  Package Removals

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 <n> 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 proxy-maintainers team and hopefully they will be able to help you.

8.  TreeCleaner Docs

The TreeCleaner Project currently have two docs:

• Frequently Asked Questions about the Gentoo TreeCleaner project
• Gentoo TreeCleaner Policy