This is an interesting one. ed fails because it can't find autoconf. emerge autoconf, then ed and you're fine. Still this shouldn't have happened. This came about starting with a stage1 and occured at emerge system time. I suspect perhaps something is whacked in our profile directory for 2004.3. (Which I need to fix anyway for cascading profiles but that's a different bug!)
*** Bug 76732 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I reassign to vapier as he told me in irc to do so.
this doesn't happen if you use 2005.0 profile!? Markus
shouldnt be using 2005.0 profiles yet ... anyways, i added the autoconf a little while back for cross-compiling ... it isnt required under other circumstances fixed in -r5
thanks for looking into this.