I also get 376 matches from "Not installed but in /etc/portage/package.mask" which are surely the packages in my overlays masked by */* but not installed. Do you know the name of this test so I can disable it in eixrc?
REDUNDANT_IF_IN_MASK (or in /etc/portage/package.nowarn: in_mask)
I think what we really need is a better way to install only certain packages from an overlay.
This is against the idea of an overlay: If you want only cerain packages copy them into your local overlay and do not add the whole overlay to portage. (But you might get troubles if you do not use eclasses or other ebuilds from the overlay which might contain corresponding patches). With eix you can still index such non-used overlays by using scripts like eix-layman (or more manually by setting ADD_OVERLAY in /etc/eixrc). For recent portage versions there was also a possibility to set global overlay order (IIRC by /etc/portage/overlay.conf or something similar; I do not remember since I never needed it).
