When installing Apache via "emerge apache" the script was not able to install the usual files in /home as the automounter took over this directory. Stopping the automounter helped. Later copying /home/httpd to another place (in my case /var/httpd) and changing the config files for Apache in /etc/apache/conf/* and /etc/passwd to reflect this move, helped. Since /home is the default place to have home directories for users, I fear I am not the only one having this problem. I did not find any documentation for emerge to move this directory somewhere else using a command line parameter. A proposed solution could be to choose a different directory or to test for automount on /home. The latter being more a hack than a clean solution...
I'm not sure how friendly apache would be to an automounted partition. Why not just mount at boot? Wanna try 1.3.24-r6 -- It's an exploit fix, and I added in functionality that works with your current config. It checks the home directory of user 'apache' and makes data_dir go there instead of /home/httpd
Solution has been added and tested.
When my /home directory is on automount which is mapped to NFS directories with a NIS card, and my root is only local root, not a network wide root, emerge breaks because apache stills tries to install into /home/httpd (why not use more commonly used /var/ directories?). The same is true for ftp and proftpd packages. Stopping automount and emerging helps though.
your problem will be a non issue in the future ... the web-apps.eclass will take care of it