Scenario: A crash produced broken files on the root partition in this case an emerge empty world will fail, because some packages may be broken but are depended by other ebuilds! In design of empty this should not be a problem, but a there exist several ebuilds which doesnt contain a consistent $DEPEND or even worther $RDEPEND. Also if $RDEPEND is set correctly but the depencies are broken due the crash configure or make will fail! The solution for this problem seems simple: If emerge would check the consisty of $DEPEND $REPEND _before_ trying to merge the actually ebuild, a big source of errors will be eliminated! I hope somebody would care about this even if this scenario does not occour daily ;-) Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Crash your root fs (DO NOT DO THIS!) 2. try to emerge empty world 3. see emerge failing on ebuilds, which have broken depencies and or broken files
there really is no way to verify the consistency of installed packages the way you want