On an almost recently bootstraped system, I run emerge /usr/portage/app-text/gnome-spell/gnome-spell-1.0.3.ebuild, and I get: (...) checking for catalogs to be installed... am az be bg cs da de el es fi fr he hu it ja kn lt lv nl no pl pt pt_BR ru sk sv ta tr uk wa vi zh_CN ./configure: line 1: aspell: command not found ./configure: line 1: aspell: command not found ./configure: line 1: aspell: command not found ./configure: line 1: aspell: command not found checking for new_aspell_config in -laspell... no configure: error: gnome-spell cannot be built without aspell library I would expect emerge to screem about needing a package to satdisfy the virtual[1] intead of running blindfolded like this. (BTW, I don't have a clue if this bug is related to bugs like 9050 and 1891. I don't know enough about how does emerge work to know that they are related) [1] Actually, I would expect emerge to find out that there is only one package that can satdisfy a certain virtual and emerge it.
running: emerge /usr/portage/app-text/gnome-spell/gnome-spell-1.0.3.ebuild is not the right way to merge something that is masked. and this is a package that is masked in /usr/portage/profiles/package.mask. if you do it that way, it will _not_ take care of dependencies properly. you need to unmask packages by reading the reasons why these packages are masked in /usr/portage/profiles/package.mask to know the implications of unmasking the packages and then comment them out of the file.
