Recently, there have been a number of packages installed on my system that have suddenly disappeared from the portage tree, such as dev-perl/Data-Dumper (now included with perl), x11-misc/lookingglass-bin (masked and no maintainer - but shouldn't this one be re-added?), sys-kernel/config-kernel (obselete?), gnome-extras/nautilus-media (no idea on this one...) These are not packages where an updated version in a different SLOT are available - they've gone completely. And the only way to find out why this is seems to be to dig through viewcvs on gentoo.org. Even then, the only reason I can find for nautilus-media is "remove nautilus-media" - not particularly helpful! I propose that portage should keep a metadata file with brief details of any package removed from the Portage tree completely (so not including old versions where an upgrade exists, although possibly including when the last package in a given SLOT is removed), *and why*. Not only would this make it much easier for users to see why their package has gone (and decide whether to unmerge), but it would also give us a much more obvious audit trail. Thoughts?
Hmm, maybe a "delete" command in the update files.
I'm for this as well. "delete" in the updates wouldn't be enough for a description though. You'll need to bring this up on the gentoo-dev@gentoo.org as we can only go as far adding the support for it. The devs at large would have to actually (be required to) make use of it. Reopen when there's some backing.
Ignore this...I'm just cleaning up the QA "later" search (since I don't think we need to be on this bug)
