eix --installed is very useful, with the extension --maintainer-needed a developer or proxied maintainer would run eix --installed --maintainer-needed and see a list of installed packages which need a maintainer. This would motivate to grab unmaintained packages.
I'm a little confused by this. Are you wanting to add maintainer-needed to equery in gentoolkit? It would certainly be possible. eix is not part of gentoolkit. So if this is to add maintainer-needed to eix, then please re-assign it to eix and its maintainers. Perhaps both? Please clarify.
Sorry, for my mistake. I fixed this now. I am not sure if it is better/possible to add this to eix so that the user runs eix --installed --maintainer-needed or better to use eix --installed together with equery and match both with some intelligence. For the user it might be the easiest to run simply eix --installed --maintainer-needed
eix only uses metadata which is also stored in the cache (and in addition looks at /var/db and mask setting). In particular, eix does not (and never will) parse metadata.xml. So eix is certainly not the right tool for this job.
I just looked at equery. The meta module is designed for single pkg queries, so would not be suitable to add the --maintainer-needed. The has module does do installed, gentoo tree, or overlay searches, but it currently only has a simple string search useful for many of the METADATA variables stored or available via portage api calls. The metadata.xml data is never stored in the vardb, so only full tree searches would work if a custom sub-module was added probably making use of the meta module's code. Filtering out the ones that did not meet the search parameter. If this is done, then for the has module, it would be best to make the search more generic. such as: equery has maintainer 'maintainer-needed' So then it would be suitable to match any possible maintainer. Further filtering to only installed pkgs would not be possible with the current search list code as it would have to cross from the installed db list back into any of the other trees to find the matching metadata.xml if the pkg exists in any of them. To be honest. I currently do not have nearly enough time to begin working on a maintainer sub-module to the has query. I already have too many unfinished tasks to do. This would not be something that is easily added to an existing equery module. At this time, it is probably easiest and the fastest to cobble together a small script using eix --installed for the list and grep the matching metadata.xml to get the results you seek.
ok, done that https://github.com/jonasstein/packageneedsme see also https://github.com/vaeth/eix/issues/47 about integration in eix. I think we can close here. Thank you all.