AFAIK it is not possible to resolve a use flag dependency of another use flag of the same package. There is the workaround of confutils.eclass functions to check such a dependency at pkg_setup phase. Instead of this workaround portage could have a simple solution, best chown by an example: DEPEND=" gtk? ( ... ) gnome? ( [gtk] ... ) " So, technically spoken, if portage is within use flag brackets in *DEPEND, it may check the token with a regular expression of "^\[.*\]$". Inside that square brackets would be equivalent to package use flag depend. PHP would benefit, openoffice ( taken for the example above ) and other I guess. That would make also many users happy that do an "emerge -e @world", for example, So that it won't fail inbetween somewhen, somewhere.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 238887 ***
