Over time, the emerge --autounmask-continue tends to introduce clutter in configuration files. It would be nice if there was an option to avoid writing the configuration file changes. For example, we can avoid the write/reload requirement for package.use simply by updating the UseManager _pusedict attribute in memory: https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/portage.git/tree/pym/portage/package/ebuild/_config/UseManager.py?h=portage-2.3.24#n103 For --keep-going dependency calculations, structures involving package masking status (package.mask, keywords, etc) will also have to be updated in memory.