I am building a bunch of servers and am not going to install X on them. I was surprised therefore when I did this: mazeppa root # emerge -pv egenix-mx-base These are the packages that I would merge, in order: Calculating dependencies ...done! [ebuild N ] media-libs/freetype-2.1.4 -doc +zlib -bindist [ebuild N ] x11-misc/ttmkfdir-3.0.9 [ebuild N ] media-libs/libpng-1.2.5-r4 [ebuild N ] x11-base/opengl-update-1.5 [ebuild N ] media-libs/fontconfig-2.2.1 [ebuild N ] app-arch/unzip-5.50-r2 [ebuild N ] app-arch/cabextract-0.6 [ebuild N ] x11-base/xfree-4.3.0-r3 -3dfx +sse -mmx -3dnow +xml2 +truetype +nls -cjk -doc -ipv6 -debug -static +pam -sdk -gatos [ebuild N ] dev-python/egenix-mx-base-2.0.5 I quickly looked through the ebuilds and found that egenix-mx-base-2.0.3 didn't require X. The difference is the use of the distutils eclass, which in turn uses the python eclass, which in turn uses virtualx. I don't know whether there is a workaround in place, except injecting X, for this, but it seems downright silly to install X in order to use distutils in an ebuild! Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: mazeppa root # emerge info Portage 2.0.49-r15 (default-x86-1.4, gcc-3.2.3, glibc-2.3.2-r1, 2.4.20-gentoo-r8) ================================================================= System uname: 2.4.20-gentoo-r8 i686 Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.06GHz Gentoo Base System version 1.4.3.10 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CFLAGS="-march=pentium3 -mcpu=pentium4 -O3 -pipe" CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" COMPILER="gcc3" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /var/qmail/control /usr/share/config /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3/share/config" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/env.d" CXXFLAGS="-O2 -mcpu=i686 -pipe" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="sandbox ccache autoaddcvs buildpkg" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://gentoo.oregonstate.edu http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gentoo" MAKEOPTS="-j3" PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage" PORTDIR_OVERLAY="" SYNC="rsync://rsync.namerica.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" USE="x86 apm crypt gif jpeg libg++ libwww mpeg ncurses nls pdflib png qt quicktime spell svga truetype xml2 zlib gdbm berkdb slang readline tcpd pam perl python apache2 curl emacs expat maildir postgres sse ssl -oss -arts -avi -cups -encode -foomaticdb -gpm -gtk -imlib -kde -gnome -mad -mikmod -motif -oggvorbis -opengl -sdl -X -xmms -xv"
*** Bug 31884 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Alastair, I rolled python.eclass back to CVS revision 1.5 until you get a chance to fix this.
