Doing a default "emerge gnome" with the default setup, curl 7.9.7 (which is required by the default Gnome 2.0.2-r2) hangs indefinitely (managed at least a 400-minute hang here, so I assume it'd never time out) while trying to determine whether to enable or disable ipv6 support. Changing the line "econf ${myconf}" in the ebuild to "econf ${myconf} --disable-ipv6" worked for me, though if people who do have support for ipv6 have experienced this, too, I suppose --enable-ipv6 would work there, too.
this is not a gnome bug, so reassigning. Fix looks trivial, add '|| myconf="${myconf} --disable-ipv6"' to the ipv6 use line.
fixed in cvs thx.
