Following BSD, i think that adding a short descr to ebuilds could be helpful to know what a particular ebuild is for. With the tremendous increasing number of ebuilds, it will be difficult to just use their names. To understand why i mean, look at: <http://www.openbsd.org/3.1_packages/i386/zsh-zftp-4.0.4.tgz-long.html> This description could be in a descr file, in the ebuild directory.
did you try `emerge -s <pkg>` ? it gives you a short blurb and a homepage to get more info ... root@vapier quakeforge # emerge -s zsh Searching... [ Results for search key : zsh ] [ Applications found : 1 ] * app-shells/zsh Latest version Available: 4.0.6-r1 Latest version Installed: [ Not Installed ] Homepage: www.zsh.org/ Description: UNIX Shell similar to the Korn shell