Hey,

I've been using Gentoo for a couple of years now... and portage was the 
#1 reason I kept using Gentoo over other Linux distros... and why I'm 
still using it.

Something that's always bugged me a lot is USE flags. Which, while I 
think that they are one of the best things about portage, I think that 
they are also one of the more annoying features as well... it can be 
relatively annoying to configure it all up. Especially researching what 
they are... yes, it just takes a little bit of effort to find them, but 
why not make it slightly easier?

Anyways, I made a patch (against Portage 2.0.51.22-r2, attached as 
verbose_use_patch.tar) that adds the description of each USE flag to the 
'emerge -pv <package>' command. The output for openoffice, for example, 
looks something like this...

[ebuild  N    ] app-office/openoffice-1.1.4-r1  -curl -hardened -java 
+kde -nptl +zlib 215,331 kB
  *  curl - Adds support for client-side URL transfer library
  *  hardened - activate default security enhancements for toolchain 
(gcc, glibc, binutils)
  *  java - Adds support for Java
  *  kde - Adds support for kde-base/kde (K Desktop Enviroment)
  *  nptl - Enable support for Native POSIX Threads Library, the new 
threading module (requires linux-2.6 or better usually)
  *  zlib - Adds support for zlib (de)compression

And, it does this for each package (only for verbose obviously) Its a 
very small, non-invasive patch, and quite small (a routine in 
portage_util.py, and 5 lines of code in emerge). 

I attached the patch here because I wasn't quite sure of the proper 
procedure for patch submission... anyways, thanks for all your work! 
Hopefully in the future I can contribute to this project.

Dustin Spicuzza