I propose a new QA subproject, the TreeCleaners.

This is a delicate subject for some developers, other developers don't care, and yet others want the cruft in the tree removed. The Tree Cleaning project's main goal is to identify broken and unmaintained packages in the tree and either get them fixed or mask and remove them.

Criteria:
1. Packages slated for removal must have no active maintainer. This is accomplished by looking in the package's metadata.xml for the maintainer tag. The maintainer tag must contain an active (non-retired) developer or team. The tree cleaners will maintain a list of ebuilds assigned to maintainer-needed; this list may end up on the web similar to Debian's WNPP[1]. A package with missing metadata.xml is assumed to be unmaintained.

2. Packages slated for removal must have open bugs filled against them. It is not the policy of the QA team nor this subproject to remove packages because they have no maintainer. There are plenty of completely working packages in the tree with no maintainer; we are not trying to remove those.

3. Packages slated for removal with simple to fix bugs may be fixed by the tree cleaners if a project member elects to do so. Many of the bugs are relatively minor ( depend fixes, revbumps, etc ) and could be done by someone given a bit of time. This isn't meant as a means to perpetually keep crap in the tree, moreso that in some cases minor bugs against a package are not grounds for removal.

4. Preferably packages slated for removal shall have a dead or unresponsive upstream. An upstream that isn't interested in maintenance means more work for Gentoo in keeping the package up to date. For packages that already lack a maintainer in Gentoo, a dead upstream means there is no developer and no upstream for a package; aka no one to do the work. A dead upstream is not *required* however, crap ebuilds for packages with an active upstream are still valid to be removed if there are major bugs filed against them.

5. Packages slated for removal shall have a last rites e-mail sent to the gentoo-dev mailing list. There will be no packages disappearing randomly out of the tree due to the tree cleaner project members. Transparency is key here, both on bugs, in package.mask, and on the mailing list. developers and users both need to know what is going on.

6. Packages slated for removal shall have a 30 day period in package.mask prior to removal. This is tree cleaner policy, and it's one that I hope other developers will adopt. I've seen things pmasked and removed after a week, a "couple of days", or just pmasked and never removed. The 30 day period allows everyone using the package to see the masking message and the corresponding bug when they use portage.

Questions and Comments are welcome, as always.

-Alec Warner

[1] http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/
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