Sorry. Bad choice of words. However, I think it may be helpful if there is some way (like in a file) to list packages that I know I do not want, but are usually added to the world upgrade anyway. kdegames and kdeedu for example. If there was somewhere to mark these, other then by manually masking them each time, it would be easy to NOT install unecessary packages. This obviously could be a problem with depend checking, but there has to be a way to mark packages that I know I do not want installed or upgraded.
You can add: <sys-apps/foo-0.0 to /var/cache/edb/dep/world to do this. Pretty sure that'll work. If you don't want to upgrade, add: <=sys-apps/foo-2.0 ... and that'll keep the version at 2.0 or below.