emerge wants to install alsa-driver as a dependancy of arts-1.2.3 (which wants to install a 2.4 series kernel). I have a 2.6 kernel and can do without both of these packages. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. install a 2.6 series kernel 2. emerge -UDp --tree arts 3.
Nope, your dep is on virtual/alsa, which on your machine is being satisfied by the alsa-driver. You'll need to modify your world/virtuals file to fix it, but it's a local issue. forums.gentoo.org can help you here.