This happens with both dev-python/numpy-1.6.2-r2 and dev-python/pycairo-1.10.0-r4 when USE_PYTHON is not set. It may happen with other dev-python ebuilds. The messages were identical. Here is the /var/log/portage/elog message as seen in mc (Midnight Commander) file viewer... ========================================================================== WARN: prepare It seems that you need to set USE_PYTHON to make sure that legacy packages will be built with respect to PYTHON_TARGETS correctly: USE_PYTHON='.[35;1m2.7.[0m' Please note that after changing the USE_PYTHON variable, you may need to run 'python-updater' to rebuild affected packages. For more information on python.eclass compatibility, please see the appropriate python-r1 User's Guide chapter [1]. [1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/Python/python-r1/user-guide.xml#doc_chap2 ========================================================================== Seems that somebody got fancy and threw in ANSI escape sequences to generate colours. The result is confusing when read from a logfile. From the referenced webpage, I was able to figure out that they wanted USE_PYTHON="2.7"
On another machine, I saw this same garbled message for dev-libs/libxml2-2.9.1-r1 Somebody, please run an rgrep on the tree, and correct this. On a tangent... why is it necessary for my make.conf to have... PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET="python2_7" PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7" USE_PYTHON='2.7' If you have one of them set, then the others should default to the same, unless explicitly over-ridden.
This is no longer printed.