I'm trying to emerge --update kdelibs and it seems they ignore distcc part of FEATURE="ccache distcc" and everything is compiled on localhost. ccache get's invoked and I'm seeing cache misses. But seems that kdelibs do not call distcc at all. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Portage was synced/updated few hours ago. I have updated environment and logged in anew. I manually verified that tasks can reach helper compile system. (IOW "distcc powerpc-...-g++ -c a.cxx" works and hits remote host.) If it is intentional effect, then I think emerge option to pause before compilation is due: compiling KDE on underpowered old notebook isn't task one can take lightly and it may waste many hours - if one figures that distcc was silently deactivated and compilation would go on for many more hours.
Post your emerge --info here, attach the actual compile output that shows how's it ignoring distcc and re-open then.