When coreutils compiles, its configure doesn't find a way to link against acl static libraries when USE='acl static', but finds it fine when USE='acl -static'. When I configured coreutils-6.9 manually, configure finds out how to link against acl libs using the ebuild's configure command line with the env variable LD_FLAGS=-static, leading me to believe it's related to one of gentoo's patches. I'm attaching my emerge --info and the diff of the relevant portions of typescripts of each compile (i.e. everything to the end of configure phase). Thanks
Created attachment 133048 [details] emerge output diff
Created attachment 133050 [details] emerge --info
the output from configure is rarely useful, you have to look at the config.log please post the one from the failing as an attachment
Created attachment 133121 [details] bz2'd config.log Thanks, never knew config.log existed.
I did some more investigating and it turns out configure didn't expect the static acl library to be compiled against nfs libraries, so recompiling sys-apps/acl with USE=-nfs allowed coreutils to compile fine. So either: the coreutils ebuild should issue a warning if sys-apps/coreutils USE="static acl" and sys-apps/acl USE=nfs; or if USE=acl, coreutils' configure (or its precursor, not really sure how aclocal/automake/autoconf work) should be patched to also test linking against "-lacl -lnfsidmap -lldap -l<the rest that are needed (I gave up ldd/nm'ing after seeing how many libs were needed)>"
the nfs flag has been dropped from sys-apps/acl so it's no longer an issue
