esearch was the first package I remember to use a cache to speed up the output of emerge -s; however, it's no longer actively being maintained and hasn't had a release in about four years. Furthermore, there are several packages that overlap the entire esearch featureset that are actively maintained, including portage-utils' "qsearch" and eix. The stabilization of Python 2.5 and the approach of future versions of Python are causing deprecation notices and outright breakage to happen in esearch. Please see bug #231223 and bug #244450.
Additionaly, the licensing of the source code is vague, so I am hesitant to bring it under Gentoo control.
I've decided to leave esearch in the tree for now, since it is still useful. Once it bit rots to the point of being really broken, I will then have it removed from the tree.
I've decided to keep esearch maintained. Source code is hosted at https://github.com/fuzzyray/esearch
