For projects where the upstream has vanished off the face of the planet,
and the project was reasonably obscure, but the code works fine still, 
there's problems with either the requirements of HOMEPAGE or the repoman
check.

From PMS:
\item[HOMEPAGE] The URI or URIs for a package's homepage, including
protocols. May be defined by an eclass. See section~\ref{dependencies}
for full syntax.

Devmanual:
HOMEPAGE: Package's homepage. If you are unable to locate an official
one, try to provide a link to freshmeat.net  or a similar package
tracking site.  Never refer to a variable name in the string; include
only raw text. 

As Infra, I suggested that zero or more valid URLs should be present in
the bug where the question was raised.

However repoman doesn't like an empty HOMEPAGE variable:

HOMEPAGE.missing              1
     app-mobilephone/smssend/smssend-3.4.ebuild

Either we need special cases to declare that it no longer has a
homepage, or we need to allow the empty HOMEPAGE.

I'm in favour of allowing the variable to empty, because I'm a lazy
upstream, and I haven't even made a basic webpage for some of my
projects (diradm, localshell, readahead-list, etc).

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
Gentoo Linux Developer & Infra Guy
E-Mail     : robbat2@g.o
GnuPG FP   : 11AC BA4F 4778 E3F6 E4ED  F38E B27B 944E 3488 4E85