Just a few minor concerns

[Kaddy]

I noticed that there was something posted earlier about this, and there is an on-going discussion about this as of last night.
However, I think that this is going a little too far.

Upon syncing this morning ro incorporate the Nvidia update, which I'd hope would be in portage, along with Firefox2.0, I noticed something peculiar, namely the masking of XMMS. HARD masking, none the less. So far, I have heard the excuse that it is because of bugs. Might I point out that this is that the ~x86 keyword is for. Not to mention the list of plugins and things that DEPEND on XMMS, this like is as long as my arm, if not longer.

Point that I am trying to make here is that, from all appearances, you are trying to take XMMS out of portage. I don't see why you have to make EVERYTHING having to do with XMMS, sure, maybe a plugin or two here and there, but not EVERYTHING having to do with it.

[Genone]

Might I point out that this is that the ~x86 keyword is for.

While I may agree with the rest of your post this statement is plain wrong. ~arch basically means "expected to work" while arch means "known to work". "Known to be broken" is either "-arch" (if it's something arch specific) or package.mask.

[Suer7reus]

XMMS is old and unmaintained. The problems is not that XMMS has bugs, or issues, or whatever, but rather that those issues will not be resolved by a future release of XMMS. The code was forked by a number of projects that are still actively maintained, and which those who are removing XMMS from the tree would like you to use. Try Audacious and/or BMP, although there are likely others I'm not aware of.

Note also that the ~ keywords do not mean what you suggest above. From the Gentoo Handbook, "Working with Portage," section 3.a.:

The testing branch [~arch] is exactly what it says - Testing. If a package is in testing, it means that the developers feel that it is functional but has not been thoroughly tested. You could very well be the first to discover a bug in the package in which case you could file a bugreport to let the developers know about it.

XMMS is not a new package version that must be tested in order to confirm its stability; rather, XMMS is an old, deprecated package (but a very good one!) that has (I believe) known issues which will not be fixed. When a package version marked ~arch is found to have bugs, that version is masked or removed and the bugs are fixed in a subsequent version.

Finally, I like XMMS. I don't use it any longer in favor of Audacious, but I realize you might want to. A quick(ish) solution is to copy the final versions of all the packages that will be removed that you wish to keep into an overlay and then unmask them manually. It will disappear out of Portage, and for a number of very good reasons, but as usual, there's not much preventing you from using it anyway.

[chunderbunny]

Flameeyes is the dev in charge of XMMS. He epxlains why it is being removed in his blog.