In a nutshell, emerge requests made on the production system are sent to a "build server", which compiles the package(s) and notifies the production server when the binary package is ready for download.
The build server will probably need to be in a chroot. I once built a load of packages (using a minimal set of USE-flags) on my desktop system (which has a fairly healthy set of USE-flags). Some packages (e.g. kde) didn't follow my USE flags, for example, I specified USE=-flac but kde still compiled against libflac because it was detected on my build system. When I installed the packages on my laptop, not much would run since it was linked against libflac, etc.
Last week I attempted a similar task, building for my sisters PC. This time I used a different approach: catalyst. I built a stage3 file, and then used that to seed building of lots of GRP packages. Since catalyst extracts the stage3, chroots, then builds the GRP inside there, it worked perfectly. (Thanks to everyone who made catalyst possible, my 8-yr-old sister is now addicted to gnome games and is learning a bit of linux at the same time!)
Daniel
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