It would appear that the pending (0321) mask of Qt3 will break sci-misc/qcad, sci-chemistry/xdrawchem and x11-misc/glunarclock.
These are fairly significant science packages for which there are no current (qt4) or "equivalent" packages. While on one hand it may not do much harm to mask Qt3 based games packages (which I believe has already been done), it is entirely another thing when one goes masking significant science packages for which there may be no substitutes (e.g. qcad and xdrawchem). So, an end user (e.g. a Gentoo user who is not a Gentoo developer) is forced to ask: a) Has research been done to determine whether there are replacements for these packages and why aren't they suggested in the mask comments? b) If one is forced to run Qt3 in order to support these older packages, is there *good* documentation on how to do this (and why isn't this suggested in the mask comments)? While I am in general in favor of migrating to the most recent packages, there are cases where packages will still work reliably well with older libraries (and would likely work forever if there were "static" build options). So before there is a rush to remove ebuilds it should be asked whether it is possible to produce a static build and/or whether there is a clear path provided for the retention of "legacy" packages? Thank you, Robert Bradbury
