dev-util/rosdep won't compile compile when dev-python/nose is not installed. I set up a container to test the ros installation, but rosdep ends up using all memory ( 4GB RAM + 8GB SWAP) and breaks with a MemoryError at the point "setup.py build". So I tried to install rosdep from the ros overlay[1], which installed dev-python/coverage and dev-python/nose. After this dev-python/rosdep from the overlay installed and I tried to install rosdep from gentoo which worked. So I installed nose and dev-util/rosdep installed. [1] https://github.com/ros/ros-overlay
commit 7bde0f457913c0e3056775ce9935e2dbf3be4be5 Author: Alexis Ballier <aballier@gentoo.org> Date: Tue Oct 6 10:39:29 2015 +0200 dev-util/rosdep: dev-python/nose is always needed at build time, not only for tests. Bug #562012 by Randolph Maaßen. thanks!