Full support for binary packages would be very handy and would attract all those users who don't have time to compile everything from source, but also want an easy way to update packages. You could add it using a PACKAGE_TYPE variable in make.conf, containing the priority order of the packages you want to install: i.e. a lazy user with an athlon-xp will have something like this: PACKAGE_TYPE="athlon-xp i686 i386 source" This means "download and install packages optimized for -march=athlon xp; if not available, use packages compiled for -mcpu=i686, then i386. If none of these are available, compile from sources using CFLAGS". An advanced tweaker (also using an athlon-xp) would instead have: PACKAGE_TYPE="athlon-xp source i686 i386" that means that i686 and i386 packages should only be used for closed-source packages. Any user could obviously want to override this option for particular packages, i.e. #PACKAGE_TYPE="source" emerge mplayer For this to work, you'd have to write in the ebuild files links to several packages, that is the source and some .tgz, i.e. (for mozilla) mozilla-1.4.tar.gz mozilla-1.4-athlon-xp.tgz mozilla-1.4-athlon.tgz mozilla-1.4-pentium4.tgz mozilla-1.4-pentium3.tgz mozilla-1.4-i686.tgz mozilla-1.4-i386.tgz mozilla-1.4-ppc.tgz etc. emerge would download the correct package according to PACKAGE_TYPE, then run emerge -k on that. The -k option would not be needed by the user any more. Obviously you don't need to make binaries for *all* packages, just the main ones...
I was just going to post sometihng like this too. I would also like to see some more support for binary packages. I believe it would definitely bring more people to gentoo too. maybe just keep them as <package>-bin like a few still are right now?
I believe this could be possible using ferringb's domain stuff and multiple binary repos + emerge -k --MyAthlonXP Repo or some kind of repo order similar to PACKAGE_TYPE. Regardless, it's not going in stable, so LATER.
Yeah, comes down to repo type, and shopping the built pkg around to the mergable repos (rpm, binpkg, dpkg, whatever). I'll stick to binpkg repo myself in writing it, but if anyone is whacky and wants to play with some rather in-flux code, contact me if you're after alternative formats.
Closing as WONTFIX, this would be covered by generic multi repository support as outlined in comments #2 and #3