I try to install abcde, which has a dependency: media-sound/id3. This fails to install in prefixed env where not the root executes the installation steps: /usr/bin/install -c -m 755 -o 0 id3 /home/evidgbo/usr/roots/gentoo/var/tmp/portage/media-sound/id3-0.15/image//usr/bin /usr/bin/install: cannot change ownership of ‘/home/evidgbo/usr/roots/gentoo/var/tmp/portage/media-sound/id3-0.15/image//usr/bin/id3’: Operation not permitted make: *** [Makefile:38: install] Error 1 The problem is in the package's Makefile, which tries to set the ownership of the id3 binary to root (-o 0), which is not possible in prefixed environment. I'm not sure media-sound/id3 is still maintained (not touched since 2016). abcde seems to use it only when needs to tag mp3 files in id3 v1 format. So not strictly needed, eg. if the user wants to use id3v2, which is the default and set in the source code of abcde, then the binary of dev-python/eyeD3 is used. Since id3 belongs to the tools of abcde, probably written by the same author, I found a similar bug fixed in abcde: https://code.google.com/archive/p/abcde/issues/17 If this is fixed (eg. Gentoo patches the source or we manage to push to upstream), then there will be probably an other bug in the ebuild to fix to be able to install in prefix. In src_install(): emake DESTDIR="${D}" install || die "emake install failed." This should be changed to: emake DESTDIR="${ED}" install || die "emake install failed." But haven't tested so far.