Okay somebody got to either fix or mask this.
Created attachment 254769 [details] Build log
This looks like it's part of the configure script. configure.in itself. Might this be a new GNU trend? I'm not familiar with how upstream types craft configure scripts, so no idea if this was an upstream-specific thing or due to upstream using some new version of autoconf.
The file configure.in (which is the legacy name for configure.ac) is written by and maintained by the individual upstream project. Although some upstreams may use tools to generate parts of it, usually anything in that file is there because an upstream developer put it there, not because a tool included it as boilerplate. (However, the file configure is generated by autoconf and frequently contains large volumes of autoconf-generated code that is outside the direct control of the upstream developers.) The relevant area of configure.in for fwbuilder-4.1.1 is lines 440-472. The ccache check looks like it is not configurable. The distcc check looks like it would respect calling configure with --without-distcc. My guess is that one or more upstream developers decided it would be convenient if the build system just automatically used those features, so that builders would not need to have a separate wrapper script to activate them. Since Portage manages those tools separately, auto-detection and auto-activation is inappropriate on Gentoo machines. The ebuild ought to disable such probing, since some users may have those tools installed for non-Portage use and not have the tools configured properly for use by Portage.
Fixed in 4.2.2 and submitted upstream.
