Quite a few changes happened on the Gentoo Emacs front. First of all: Matthew Kennedy is no more with us. After years of support and dedication to the project and to Emacs in special, he decided to leave and hand over the duties to others. That leaves me nearly alone with Emacs, which scared me a bit at the beginning, as I always left all tricky emacs and emacs-cvs things to Matthew, I took care of the simple bugs mostly. :)
Anyway. Now I am forced to really read the ebuilds of the two big packages we have here. As there were some user requests I digged in a bit and changed the ebuild of the development version of Emacs. Most important to all 22.* versions is the fact they have some more USE flags (gnome, alsa, the 23.* branch will likely follow), which mostly just pull in the right dependency, Emacs' build system will detect them if they are present anyway. Now choose your profile.

Bleeding edge? Hell yeah!

If you are curious with Emacs development you can emerge one of our live ebuilds. emacs-cvs-23.* is the Unicode branch, while emacs-cvs-22.0.9999* is the not so experimental part of Emacs, and close to a to-be-released version anyway.

New features, please. But don't hurt me.

Based on a CVS snapshot we have the emacs-cvs-22.0.0.9x ebuilds (.93 at the moment) which do no checkout from CVS but download a tarball provided by the Emacs developers. That is the safest way to have a known state without the need to forbear from having the newer features.