I copied 1.1.17 ebuild over to 1.1.18, generated digests, unmasked it and emerged it; worked fine.
Indeed, but bug #115540 is still present in it - so I applied the following patch: http://bugs.gentoo.org/attachment.cgi?id=77645 Works for me with the patch. Please include a similar patch in the next official ebuilds...
Thanks, commited to CVS and included the patch from bug #115540.