See bug 1778 at http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1778 for background information. Without having researched it yet, it looks like file and directory permission are being incorrectly set after an emerge. Experience shows that emerging tetex works fine, but is not usable/accessable by the system. In my personal case, /usr/share/texmf/* was set to chown 501:501 after an emerge. I have no user with UID 501.
this could be a bug in the tetex (?) package.
I don't work with tetex much so i have limited experience with how it should behave. The only package i'm using to test tetex is t1lib. Emerging tetex does not produce any errors, and states to run 'texconfig font rw' at the end of the emerge to allow all users to create fonts. It looks like this is what t1lib is trying to do, but texconfig grants write permission on different directories then t1lib is trying to write to. All of t1lib's actions (as far as tetex is concerned) are taking place againt /usr/share/texmf/fonts/pk/ljfour/public/cm. I tried creating this tree by hand, but that just led t1lib to produce a different set of 'Access Denied' messages when trying to place files into that dir. Oddly enough I have it chmod 777 and it still can't write.
this is resolved in tetex anyway
