The ebuild for alsa-utils 1.0.8 doesn't take into account the -nls USE flag causing the build to fail on systems with nls disabled. I'm not a portage expert, but adding the following to the media-sound/alsa-utils-1.0.8.ebuild corrects the problem: IUSE="nls" src_compile() { econf \ $(use_enable nls) \ || die "configure failed" } Apologies in advance for any faults with my report, this is my first :) Thanks
I tried this also and it worked for me. It looks sound from what I know of writing ebuilds.
fixed in latest version now, thanks for reporting.