When installing from scratch from the LiveCD and using the stage 3 tarball, the Pentium3 optimized build fails while compiling the kdegraphics package. It says that it cannot find giflib. I did an emerge search for this library, and sure enough it wasn't on my system. I realize you probably don't distribute the library due to LZW patent issues, but if the library is a dependency, why didn't emerge catch it?
I thought I would elaborate a bit on the procedure I followed: 1) Partition drive and mount directories as per instructions 2) Mount packages directory on CD for installing xfree and kde. 3) install gentoo using stage 3 tarball 4) chroot, ran scripts, customized make.conf etc. 5) emerge sync 6) emerge -u world 7) emerge --usepkg xfree 8) emerge --usepkg kde During step 8, it failed trying to link against libgif. Unfortunately, I don't have a record of which file it was trying to link at the time. I just know it was in the kdegraphics package.
giflib should be installed. kuickshow.so (from kdegraphics) links against imlib, which links against giflib. imlib has a dep on giflib, but I found a problem with the RDEPEND record for imlib. That's not my territory so I submitted a new bug #14686 for the right people to handle. I cannot reproduce any other similar problem. So, unless you can reproduce that situation, there's no way for me really to understand what the cause of this was (the above bug probably wasn't).
Well, it should be ok AFAICS, if you have any further info I'll be glad to hear it...