I stumbled upon emergin Midnight Commander. It's named gnome-extra/mc. emerge --pretend shows, that Midnight Commander, the Console-Application, will trigger X11 to be installed. Why? Because in my "USE" X is defined. So emerge is perfectly correct. But: if --explain would be possible, emerge would show something like gpmxxxx (because of gpm in USE(profiles/make.default)) X11 (because of X in USE(make.conf)) MC (the packet you requested) or with another packet: kdebase (requiered by KOFFICE) somespecialpackage it could also show, from WHICH use-Variable all depends.
Good idea. I am going to try to implement this eventually.
it can be useful to have an emerge --dependencies that show all the dependecies (mandatory and optional) disregarding the installed packages.
is emerge -pv <package> sufficient ?
The features are available in emerge and the gentoolkit to deal with this. Can it be closed as INVALID?
Or at the very least - LATER.
closing with comment #3 yes it is sufficient
