Today I ran an "emerge -u world" that wanted to emerge a number of ebuilds, starting with dev-perl/Text-Balanced-1.95. But this ebuild didn't want to compile/install. I checked the ebuild Makefile.PL file and noticed it needed dev-perl/ExtUtils-Makemaker. After emerging that packages, the Text-Balanced installed without any problems. In short; dev-perl/Text-Balanced-1.95 is dependant on dev-perl/ExtUtils- Makemaker, which needs to emerged first.
Actually, the problem has nothing to do with Text-Balanced (it is a pure perl module with no non-perl-core dependancies, I checked). MakeMaker was recently removed from the perl-module eclass as a dependancy because the issues that required it there have been resolved - the default version in perl 5.8 is sufficient, and perl 5.6.1 has now been patched to the appropriate level. However, anyone performing a depclean, for instance, will have their copy of MakeMaker (if they installed it via ebuild) removed since it is no longer marked anywhere as a dependancy - causing the snafu that you incurred.
http://dev.gentoo.org/~mcummings/makemaker.html for a slightly longer version of the repetitive answer to this question. Let me know if you have any questions.
