Here's an interesting one.. The clock battery for one of my machines died, and since I rarely look at the clock on the machine, I'd not really noticed. Having a bad date/time (Dec 31 1998 was mine) caused the e2fsprogs ebuild to loop endlessly in the configure stage -- I suspect this was because it thought it needed to do some updating, but I've lost the output. I marked this as minor, because having an outdated clock is generally known as A Bad Thing, but since I'd never seen this behaviour before, thought it was at least worth a minor bug report. I'll see if I can find anything specific to the e2fsprogs build, but I'm not too familiar with Automake tools.. Evidently, other builds worked just fine. Cheers..
there are many packages that'll exhibit this behavior since it's a feature of autotools to check timestamps and update appropriately ... perhaps you should look into the ntp-client script ?