I'd like multi-level verbosity for portage so that i could get more info about it. For example, emerge -pvv could give me a short description of each build, i.e. [ U ] media-gfx/gimp-2.0.1 +jpg +png +jbig (875,920k) The GNU Image Manipulation Program Also, why are there not long descriptions of things? In Debian, you can read the huge description about the app using the dselect interface. Why not allow ebuild creators to supply a product-ge-ver.desc (i.e. gimp-ge-2.0.0.desc) to specify the long description? (ge here being >=; g being >, e being =; l being <; ne being !=; etc)
ehm, that's what -s / esearch is for. Long descriptions can be supplied in metadata.xml.