That way, when a user merges an orphan package, he would notice the package needs a maintainer and, maybe, one of them could volunteer to either try to help with it via proxy-maintainers or even become a dev. The elog message should point to that possibilities. Thanks a lot :-) Reproducible: Always
I think maybe a better place to highlight this kind of information would be at http://packages.gentoo.org, since it feels like we're nagging people if emerge produces this kind of message. We already show the maintainer in the build log via einfo: http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/portage.git;a=commit;h=7cba4cf96291fddb6a93586caef1328008a3ac5d
But I still think this should be shown when a user merges the package. From my point if view, if a user is emerging that package, it's because he needs it and uses it and, maybe, he would be willing to help on its maintainance if he see it's orphan. From example, I remember years ago when I was in Mandriva Triage Team and I asked in forums for help on packaging of some applications (as Mandriva had a real problem of orphan packages), and some people started to try to help, at first asking in mailing lists and finally even becoming packagers (some of them finally landed on Mageia ;))
I like this idea of checking and displaying a warning about maintainer-needed packages, but not necessarily to all users. Maybe a qa-warning that one can enable/disable would be a good compromise? For example, we could do something similar to euscan and warn about new versions of all packages and unmaintained (maintainer-needed) packages for devs and users that enable it in their configuration, while leaving regular users alone.
I agree with Zac that this would just be nagging users and it shouldn't be in emerge. If you can however demonstrate that a generous portion of our userbase would actually support this (via a forum poll or -users ML thread you could link to), I might be persuaded, as it isn't a very invasive change. Especially if someone else is willing to submit a patch. ;-)
