while you should be overriding -j# on `emake` lines, if you do want to tweak it via MAKEOPTS, you should be appending, not clobbering the variable broken code: net-im/silc-plugin/silc-plugin-1.0.1-r4.ebuild:47: ( MAKEOPTS="" emake -C lib ) || die "silc-client's lib compilation failed"
This ebuild is no longer current. It has been replaced by silc-client and the silc-client ebuilds do not have this problem. I have pkgmoved silc-plugin to silc-client and removed the silc-plugin ebuilds.