Actually, this seems to be a problem of "info" and "emacs", but portage might easily work around the problem: Although, in general, these programs have no difficulties with bz2-compressed info-files, this is not true for dir.bz2 in other directories than /usr/share/info. For example, after emerge of emacs-cvs-22.0.93, the file /usr/share/info/emacs-22.0.93/dir.bz2 is created by portage, but although this directory is stored into INFOPATH, neither "info" nor "emacs" (tested only with 22.0.93) will display the nodes stored in that file. As soon as the file is decompressed, the data is displayed as expected. (The other compressed files cause no difficulty). It seems to be accidental that a compressed /usr/share/info/dir.bz2 works anyway with "info" and "emacs" - maybe this "main" directory is treated somehow differently by these programs. So my suggestion is that portage should always create uncompressed */dir files which would work around this strange behavior of "info" and "emacs".
i was unaware of the stuff portage has in place ... this has been fixed in latest portage version
*** Bug 165276 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
