<gory details of many frustrating hours of fighting with one particular gentoo package have been snipped to eliminate uncouth language>
I think of a gentoo "binary" package (e.g. oracle-jdk-bin) as an ebuild that fetches a file from somewhere, then merely unpacks that file and sticks the results in /opt/<whatever>. My experience today with libreoffice-bin has broken my mental model of how a gentoo "binary" package behaves. While trying to debug some broken behavior in the (non-binary) localc spreadsheet app, I decided to install libreoffice-bin as an experiment. The libreoffice-bin package wanted to drag in dozens of other non-binary gentoo packages before it would install itself, and even caused a blocker between two different versions of poppler. (I said "no" because I thought the blocker would make the entire experiment fail in the end.) Any thoughts from you gentoo gurus would be most appreciated.
