I suppose that is the best briefest subject I could come up with. Anyway, I am using the kernel mjc-sources, which has alsa drivers included in the kernel. I prefer to run my kernel without modules. Just a quirky preference, I suppose. Several packages depend on alsa-driver, alsa-libs, or alsa-utils. These packages always fail to rebuild. I should never need alsa-driver now, since the driver is built in to the kernel. But, of course, alsa-utils and alsa-libs depend on this package. It's not just the ebuild dependency either. In alsa- libs, in particular, it's in the configure portion of building the package that it fails needing the alsa-driver package. It's as if it can't find a proper version installed. And in reality, that package IS installed.
try gentoo-sources
That's not a solution. That is unless things have changed. Do gentoo-sources provide alsa-drivers in the kernel? How about ppp with mppe support built in? The only kernel I could find that allows me to run without modules, and still do what I need to do, is mjc-sources. I suggest this is a problem with the packages in question, not the kernel source. Suggesting an alternate source, leaves me with a new set of issues. Or, maybe this is a solution. considering the lm_sensors package won't build either, since the sensor driver is in the kernel and the kernel is not modular. But, if I wanted to run a modular kernel, I'd go back to SuSE.
The point is that gentoo-sources is the kernel which is supported by the gentoo-linux distribution (Technically we support gentoo-sources, vanilla-sources, xfs-sources, ppc-sources, sparc-sources, openmosix-sources, and usermode-sources) lolo-sources, mjc-sources, ppc-sources-dev, development-sources, and any other trees that may be added in the near future are NOT supported Gentoo Linux kernels and have features which may cause breakage of various packages in the Gentoo Linux world.