How to favor source-built over binary packages?

[Guenther Brunthaler]

I chose Gentoo because it is a source-based Distribution.

However, much to my dislike, a lot of packages were installed as *-bin rather than being built from source.

For instance, when I try to merge "jdk", "openjdk-bin" would be merged by default as a dependency rather than "openjdk" which is also available.

Of course I could merge "openjdk" manually, but this is a lot of additional work in general because I needed to review all dependencies of all packages being merged, always checking for unwanted *-bin packages.

How can I reverse the portage default, so that binary packages are only chosen if there is no way to initially build the source package, i.e. for the famous compiler bootstrap problem when a compiler needs itself to be compiled.

But in all other cases, I want everything being built from source!

If I liked binary packages so much, I could have stayed with Debian.

BTW, I did not explicitly set any USE flags or FEATURES for requesting binary packages:

[sam_]

The default is only ever binary for cases where there's a bootstrapping problem (Java, Rust). Someone is currently working on wiring up mrustc so we can have a bootstrap chain for Rust and we've discussed figuring that out for Java too.

Can you list what the other packages were other than Java and Rust, given they're very much a special case (that you identified)?

(With regard to generally avoiding binaries, I plan on pursing bug 885827 at some point, but I don't think it would've really helped here without more data at least.)

[netfab]