Orphaned packages
Orphaned ( aka maintainer-needed ) packages, are those that nobody, neither a maintainer nor a herd, is looking after them. Such packages oftet get removed from portage because either they don’t work anymore or there are just too many open bugs and nobody really cares about them.
Recently the TreeCleaner Project, as a decent way to inform everybody ( both devs and users ) about packages that are candidates for removal, introduced a new package to track them.
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/qa/treecleaners/maintainer-needed.xml
If you want to proxy maintain one of them, just send an e-mail to gentoo-dev mailing list and who knows, maybe a dev will pop up and work with you :-). If you haven’t heard about proxy maintainers before just take a look here and here.
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http://gist.github.com/541167 is a small python script which fetches the set of toremove packages (or maintainer-needed) by scraping the URL (in a possibly ugly way) and intersects it with the set of installed packages (through the portage API).
This provides a sorted list of packages which you use, but need a maintainer.
Excellent script. I will add it to treecleaners page as well. Thanks!!
Please send me your name at hwoarang[at]gentoo[dot]org so I can give you some kudos for your job on treecleaners page
Is there an easy way to differentiate between packages requiring upstream maintainers which only require ebuild maintainers because upstream has no interest in maintaining ebuilds?
No there is no easy way to do that. maintainer-needed is for orphaned ebuilds -> ebuilds without maintainers. We don’t really care ( at this point ) about the upstream status. There are many packages without upstream anymore which work just fine