Sorry, as the machine that found this bug is still being installed upon, I cannot provide emerge --info. This was on an amd64 machine, which was synched just hours ago. emerge splashutils failed when trying to compile in /usr/include/ft2build.h, which did not exist. I then ran emeger freetype, then tried splashutils again, and it worked perfectly. I'm new to the portage system, but it seems like a missing dependency.
A thousand apologies for the terrible typing - it's late, and I've been at this install for a while.
splashutils already has a conditional dependency on freetype (dependent on whether the 'truetype' flag is set or not). Which version of splashutils were you trying to merge?
1.1.9.8-r1, the stable build for amd64. I had set neither truetype nor freetype, if that helps. I simply emerged freetype to fix the issue.
Could you please try the 1.1.9.10 version? I think this bug should be fixed there.
The problem should be fixed in splashutils-1.3.