When emerge is called with --onlydeps and the package is blocking itself over a virtual (e.g. net-mail/exim blocks virtuals/mta) it refuses to install the package. A patch on 2.0.9 is available at http://majestix.homelinux.net/emerge.patch
Created attachment 1966 [details, diff] links seems to have problems with bugzilla... again... Well, seems links doesn't work well with bugzilla, so again... emerge --nodeps refuses to install packages blocking itself (e.g. net-mail/exim blocks virtual/mta) Here is the patch on 2.0.9. again....
Does Portage 2.0.11 work correctly in this regard?
This appears to be fixed in Portage 2.0.20+ (rewrote a good deal of this code.) Closing this bug.