If you compile a binary package, then portage should record the USE flags used when compiling that package into the package binary. This would help building automated installations in a heterogeneous environment. The typical case is that you have packages A and B. With default USE flags, A would depend on B, but you don't want A to use B even though you're going to install B on some computers. So you build a binary package with: USE="-B" emerge -b A Now you can't run emerge -K A on a computer where you don't need B at all (even though the binary package A does nothing with B), without having B installed, or you need to supply the USE flag again. The whole process is very frustrating, because you need to record every special USE flag you've used to compile every package... Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
Err... It *is* recorded in the tbz2. What you're after is the ability to depend (or rdepend in your case) on packages w/ a use flag enabled, which is a dupe. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 2272 ***
