I noticed this bug inside a openvz VPS for which i had emerge -uaD world'd. Openvz's scripts run several cp -p to initialize the VPS. I was told by kir from #openvz at freenode that this was a known bug in coreutils and is acknowledged upstream. The coreutils bug is discussed and fixed by FC5 here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=190601 (I didn't test it, see below) FYI, the vzctl workaround (which replaces cp -p by --preserve=mode,ownership) is here: http://bugzilla.openvz.org/show_bug.cgi?id=153 (I applied this fix and it worked) emerge --info inside the VPS: Portage 2.1-r2 (default-linux/x86/vserver, gcc-4.1.1, glibc-2.4-r3, 2.6.16-026test015 i686) ================================================================= System uname: 2.6.16-026test015 i686 AMD Athlon(tm) Processor Gentoo Base System version 1.6.14 app-admin/eselect-compiler: [Not Present] dev-lang/python: 2.4.3-r1 dev-python/pycrypto: 2.0.1-r5 dev-util/ccache: [Not Present] dev-util/confcache: [Not Present] sys-apps/sandbox: 1.2.17 sys-devel/autoconf: 2.13, 2.59-r7 sys-devel/automake: 1.4_p6, 1.5, 1.6.3, 1.7.9-r1, 1.8.5-r3, 1.9.6-r2 sys-devel/binutils: 2.16.1-r3 sys-devel/gcc-config: 1.3.13-r3 sys-devel/libtool: 1.5.22 virtual/os-headers: 2.6.11-r5 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CBUILD="i686-pc-linux-gnu" CFLAGS="-O2 -march=i686 -pipe" CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/env.d /etc/gconf /etc/terminfo" CXXFLAGS="-O2 -march=i686 -pipe" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="autoconfig distlocks metadata-transfer sandbox sfperms strict" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://distfiles.gentoo.org http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/gentoo" PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages" PORTAGE_RSYNC_OPTS="--recursive --links --safe-links --perms --times --compress --force --whole-file --delete --delete-after --stats --timeout=180 --exclude='/distfiles' --exclude='/local' --exclude='/packages'" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage" SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" USE="x86 apache2 bitmap-fonts cli crypt dlloader dri ipv6 isdnlog latin1 ncurses nls nptl nptlonly pam pcre pppd python readline reflection session spl ssl tcpd threads truetype-fonts type1-fonts xorg zlib elibc_glibc input_devices_keyboard input_devices_mouse input_devices_evdev kernel_linux userland_GNU video_cards_apm video_cards_ark video_cards_ati video_cards_chips video_cards_cirrus video_cards_cyrix video_cards_dummy video_cards_fbdev video_cards_glint video_cards_i128 video_cards_i740 video_cards_i810 video_cards_imstt video_cards_mga video_cards_neomagic video_cards_nsc video_cards_nv video_cards_rendition video_cards_s3 video_cards_s3virge video_cards_savage video_cards_siliconmotion video_cards_sis video_cards_sisusb video_cards_tdfx video_cards_tga video_cards_trident video_cards_tseng video_cards_v4l video_cards_vesa video_cards_vga video_cards_via video_cards_vmware video_cards_voodoo" Unset: CTARGET, EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS, INSTALL_MASK, LANG, LC_ALL, LDFLAGS, LINGUAS, MAKEOPTS, PORTAGE_RSYNC_EXTRA_OPTS, PORTDIR_OVERLAY
and we already have versions in ~arch that include this fix
