Sorry, but I feel that I must explain once more:
When I came to Gentoo many years ago, this was a very rare problem,
but the removal of packages has tremendously increased, and it is
not only me who is observing this problem - there were already some
threads in the forums, and people planning to but not coming back
to Gentoo for this reason.
Awesome so they could've get involved and maintain it themselves if they seen
it so crushial for their lives.
Agreed. That's why there are last rights announcements with a 30 day
delay before the package is actually removed.
So this 30 day delay will enable these people to get involved,
especially for all the packages which were removed in the last years?
Now it is apparent that an archive for dropped packages (in the
form of keeping masked packages or some other form) is not needed:
I want to join your club with the time machine!
In a nutshell, the people complaining about removals should stop
complaining and start volunteering to maintain either the packages
Yep! That's the right attitude: Give the people 30 days (even those
people who are currently not at Gentoo for whatever reason) to know
years in advance all the software they might ever need and tell them,
if in doubt, just to maintain hundreds of packages!
It is *of course* their fault if they do not!
Later, if they need a package, you can blame them that they have
not voluntereered for all these packages they possibly might have needed,
because years ago they had 30 days time to think about it (even longer
if they took the time and resources to backup on their machines all
tarballs of all packages).
To be serious: If somebody *has* the resources to backup all dropped
tarballs, he should please donate these resources to Gentoo, because
Gentoo nowadays definitely cannot afford to waste a byte.
Or how else can it be explained that this idea of enabling people
to use previous packages if they need to is fought so intensively?
All it costs is some amount of disk/mirror space.
Or is it really that you *want* to blame the user and put
pressure on him to maintain packages?
Strange that as soon as user's resources are required, Gentoo's
attitude was always quite the opposite: E.g. it just *always* installs
bash completion or systemd files (or previously also static libraries,
although I must admit that the situation for the latter was now
improved, fortunately) - the user must care about cleaning
for himself if he does not want to waste resources.
Sure, both is an admissible attitude - only the user is responsible
for everything.
It is just: *I* want to contribute only to a distribution which
also cares somewhat about the users.
Maybe some developers feel the same, but it is of course up to you
to decide this.
Regards
Martin
