/usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/portage.py has a comment on line 30348 about "checkdeps" being depreciated. It is extremely unlikely that the author means the price of checkdeps has been reduced. I humbly submit the author meant "deprecated", as in "to desire the removal of" (and "to pray against, as in evil", for what it's worth). I've seen another offensive use of "depreciated" in a bugzilla entry for Gentoo, something like "Docs - depreciated". Just search on depreciated. I have no idea where to report Gentoo's bugzilla bugs.
you can file bugs about bugs.gentoo.org on bugs.gentoo.org
make that line 995 (or near there, depending on version). Sorry about the "30348" type.