With the help of the new emaint capability in portage I found that my system had the following problem: 'dev-tex/latex-beamer' has no ebuilds available The version that I am currently using is 3.00 and was marked ppc (see http://www.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/dev-tex/latex-beamer/Attic/latex-beamer-3.00.ebuild?rev=1.6&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup ). It has been removed by nattfodd (I believe) and now all versions of this ebuild in the tree are marked ~ppc. This shouldn't happen. Stable ebuild shouldn't be removed from non x86 archs without a proper replacement.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 116811 ***