It would be nice to have something like "Suggested: " available in Portage like Debian's APT has. This would be very useful for us with xfce-base/xfce4-meta where we could only then suggest a standard font with enough glyphs (like dejavu) and standard _full_ icon theme (like tango-icon-theme). Many other packages will these requirement in tree, and it's rather impossible to collect them as dependencies. And the idea of every single package defining it's own postinst message using elog for these is not clean. Example scenario: Ebuild has SDEPEND="x11-themes/tango-icon-theme". Package manager defaults on not installing suggested packages. A message is printed: "These packages were NOT installed. Suggested packages are: x11-themes/tango-icon-theme." User has defined suggested packages to be installed by default: x11-themes/tango-icon-theme gets pulled in as only-RDEPEND. (Sorry if I'm filing a duplicate request, I'm suprised nobody has asked this before.)
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 327701 ***