fontconfig should RDEPEND on freetype, there's no doubt about that, but as some fontconfig versions (e.g. 2.3.2-r1, current stable) do not specify RDEPEND in the ebuild, the implicit RDEPEND=DEPEND gets overwritten by autotools.eclass Please fix the affected ebuilds, or give me the OK to do so, by adding: RDEPEND=${DEPEND}
On a side note, autotools.eclass is now fixed to not polute RDEPEND: http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo-x86/eclass/autotools.eclass?r1=1.45&r2=1.46
When you do this, can you also move the WANT_AUTOMAKE to above the inherit line so that the automake deps are added correctly? As is, it won't pull in automake-1.9 as required, so it fails on new installs where automake-1.9 isn't present (at least it did here on ppc).
Committed. If this causes any problems, send em my way.