On Mon, 2023-08-28 at 15:04 +0200, Arve Barsnes wrote: > dev-lang/php:7.4 is also masked, so I assume this is due to be > removed soon.
7.X is EOL upstream as of 9 months ago, hence the mask. It was acknowledged in the mask commit that we would lose access to some other packages because of this deprecation, but that's again an upstream issue rather than a Gentoo one. Gentoo is favoring security by masking 7.4, but you can always override it as you see fit for your system(s).
