What i say is for both Normal and Expert modes. When reporting, reporters are not clearly enough advised to give their - emerge --info - emerge -vp ebuild1 ebuild2 Of course, the Normal mode should include, not only a message, but also show two new boxes, so that beginners cant have the excuse "i did not see the message". If there are new boxes with explicit titles, they hopefully read them, and give what's required. Too many new bugs are missing emerge --info. Maint often have to ask for it. I personally also always provide immediately emerge -vp foobar, and, that is always helpful. It reflects two aspects: - the content of my /etc/portage (keywords could bring in unstable things; package.use could alter flags) - it shows the exact context in which sth had been compiled, even years later when the mentioned profile does not exist, or when the maint can not (for various reasons) check the corresponding make.profile . An example for the last point is the bug 71747 : 5 years later, bug is still not fixed; and despite comment 12, i can not even try to repro, because, i started Gentoo in 2005, did not keep backup of the profiles, and have no clue what profiles before 2005 could look like. Emerge -vp will give in the same shot both the USE context, and the exact versions. Too many people forget to give those. If the lines are "properly copied and pasted", it even should show if the ebuild belongs to an alternative tree (overlay): if the message asking emerge -vp says to copy the full paragraph; otherwise, people may cut off the eventual trailing [1] ... because some ebuilds are available with the same name in several different overlays. Good luck, thanks.
The new "select product" page includes a note to attach emerge --info.
