I spent approximately 10 hours trying to track down an issue with portage, which turned out to be a problem with the slocate bd being corrupted. Support thread here: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-583703.html Nowhere in the documentation is it mentioned what this error could mean, and google'ing only found a few causes, none of them what happened in this case. Would it be possible to state why scanning /etc failed? Or at least, write a line to the log file (I'd have thought an error would have been important enough to be logged to /var/log/emerge.log
In svn r7871 it's fixed to show the output from the failed find command.
This has been released in 2.1.3.11.