I was emerging arts on a "clean" system (where clean means that X11 wasn't previously installed -- all the X components were brought in via the ebuild dependencies). Arts wouldn't emerge because it failed its internal configuration: it couldn't work through its dependencies. The first problem was that it couldn't find the X include directory (it checks for .../X11/Intrinsic.h). I added "--x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/lib" to the myconf variable, this allowed arts to compile even though x11-libs/libXt wasn't present on the system (that is the package that provides /usr/include/X11/Intrinsic.h, which is what configure was dying on). I added x11-libs/libXt to the DEPENDS variable and it also successfully merged. But it appears that libXt isn't actually used by arts; it just uses it to check to see that it can detect the X include directory. The version I was merging was kde-base/arts-3.5.2-r1.
arts must die...
Please try and reproduce with arts-3.5.5
See Comment 3....
