The build system for this package runs a small test to see if the host system has a working bc binary. However it neglects to suppres the GNU welcome message that bc always prints, and thus its test fails. The solution is to patch configure.in, line 311. bc should be run with the -q flag. made the change on my system with a sed in the ebuild and everything was happy.
later versions are not affected by this problem
same issue in version 4.22
on further inspection, it seems that the issue is resolved if I unset BC_ENV_ARGS before attempting the compile. I use BC_ENV_ARGS to make bc show me 3 decimal places, however it also seems to force the banner to appear, no matter what. Still, the build should not fail because I'm using BC_ENV_ARGS. I believe the simplest solution would be to unset the variable within the ebuild before calling the configure script.
Fixed.
