I decided to move on from Gaim, since it is now masked. So I emerged pidgin,
backed up ~/.gaim, unmerged gaim and tried to launch pidgin . . .

Hmm, it seems that I can launch /usr/bin/finch, that brings up an ncurses
interface, but not pidgin. There is no pidgin binary! Have I missed out
some necessary USE flag perhaps?

$ pidgin
-bash: pidgin: command not found

# ls -la /usr/bin/pidgin
ls: cannot access /usr/bin/pidgin: No such file or director

# emerge -pDv pidgin

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild R ] net-im/pidgin-2.2.1 USE="dbus gstreamer ncurses nls perl
spell -bonjour -debug -doc -eds -gadu -gnutls -groupwise -gtk -meanwhile -networkmanager -prediction -qq -sasl -silc -tcl -tk -zephyr"
0 kB

Total: 1 package (1 reinstall), Size of downloads: 0 kB
--
Regards,
Mick