According to the kernel-2.6 pcmciautils guide (http://kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/pcmcia/pcmcia.html), pcmciautils requires sysfsutils-1.3.0, but the ebuild in the portage tree has the line "RDEPEND=">=sys-fs/sysfsutils-1.2.0-r1". When it installed sysfsutils it did not install 1.3.0 so this had to be done manually. Shouldn't 1.3.0 be installed or be added into the RDEPEND?
sys-fs/sysfsutils-1.2.0-r1 and up contains a write-attribute.patch which adds the functionality needed by pcmciautils.