We will drop the tools/ directory tree from CTAN in a day. This tree does not hold TeX-related materials-- instead it holds materials that are useful for archivists and people dealing with archives.

When CTAN started, finding those materials could be a problem so keeping them with the archive made sense. Happily, the state of the Internet is that these materials are now easy to find and the cost of our keeping up on latest versions, etc., outweighs any convienence for our users. Indeed, many of our holdings are out of date and others of the holdings are now of historical interest only.

So in a day we will drop the tree (we can't think of a reason why someone would want us to delay for the day but we can't see any reason that a delay could hurt so we will wait the day).

Jim Hefferon CTAN team