For months I've tried to determine how to replace "etcat -v" with an equivalent equery command, but have failed. Doing "equery --help" shows some options, and it's presumed that the help is fairly complete based on the length of the output. But tonight I looked at the man page (after seeing my question answered using some flags that I didn't know existed), and found that it's not. Lines like "list(l) <local-opts> pkgspec - list all packages matching pkgspec" should probably be rewritten more in the style of other *nix commands, where instead of <local-opts> there is a bracketed list of actual options. Such as [-i -I -p -o -f -e -d] or [-<iIpofed>] It doesn't take much more space to include something like that, and it would be much more helpful. It would be helpfu to the new user, in that it would give her something to look up on the man page; and would be helpful to an experienced user in jogging his memory as to which letter those developers used.
Not a documentation product bug.
Let's call this solved when 269071 is resolved. They're not exactly the same thing, but this one will never be resolved on its own. Rather, the rewrite of equery and its subsequent documentation rewrite should illuminate problems like this... *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 269071 ***