I need to appologise for the last comment I made in my previous message
about you not discussing this issue. I see that you did mention it, but
it was before I came on board.

http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-catalyst/msg_78cd6eae401bfa7a499418bc6cbc225e.xml

I hope you will accept my appology.

However, I would still like to know why this conversion was needed; all
we had to do was update the manpage. The conversion does make it more
difficult for us to generate reproducable tarballs, which means that for
gentoo's qa policy someone always has to keep the tarball we use in
their dev space and we have to point to that tarball with SRC_URI.

But, that would not be necessary if we generate the tarball from the git
repo e.g. the way openrc does.

William