This is the end…
I think I’ll stop bumping dju-sources ebuilds as I don’t use them anymore. Indeed, inotify has been included into mainline since 2.6.13, as well as the ALPS touchpad driver some time before. And I really can do without vesafb-tng, that’s why I have returned to the holy -ck patchset.
I also had strange NFS issues while upgrading from 2.6.12 to 2.6.13: I’m sharing the Portage tree over NFS, and emerge hanged before src_unpack() on my clients (RPC: error 5 connecting to server, lockd: couldn't create RPC handle). I had never experienced this with previous kernels. Weird! I had to add nolock to the NFS mount options in order to solve the problem. My NFS mount options now look like rw,hard,intr,nolock,tcp,rsize=8192,wsize=8192, and I hope there won’t be any additional locking problems (I do have the distlocks FEATURE enabled, and I do have added portmap and nfsmount - not netmount - to the concerned runlevel).