giflib needs the xv package in order to do it's test suite. if xv is absent, emerge will fail if maketest is enabled. this is the same as bug 70135, which was for libungif. usata's libungif patch will work equally well here. i made some small changes to the patch, mainly to clarify things for the end user (eg. changed "run src_test" to "run the tests") and removed 'epause; ebeep; epause' since they just produce errors for me: /usr/lib/portage/bin/ebuild.sh: line 76: epause: command not found /usr/lib/portage/bin/ebuild.sh: line 76: ebeep: command not found /usr/lib/portage/bin/ebuild.sh: line 76: epause: command not found but maybe that's just me or something. the patch, attached, has been successfully tested against giflib-4.1.3.ebuild thanks.
Created attachment 44393 [details, diff] maketest patch
Fixed in CVS. ebeep and epause are in eutils.eclass, so if you want to use them, add eutils to inherit. Thanks for the bug report.
