Should we remove the packages tree? The packages are almost certainly terribly out of date. There's been 1 functional commit (not including things like URL and license changes from the ASF changeover) since 2009.
To give an example the RedHat rpm packages don't have a rhel-6 package, the documentation points for rhel-5 points you to a URL that is dead and the dev list on tigris. Back in the day it made a lot of sense to try and help provide some packaging support. But at this point we are well packaged by a variety of 3rd parties. So I'm not sure we're really gaining anything by having these around anymore. If we're not going to keep these things up to date then I think we should just remove them.
