A bug has been reported (and fixed) upstream which hit me recently, so I'm not sure if you want to address it. I received a segmentation fault when trying to use avrdude-5.8 with the AVRDragon. See http://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?27507 .
Created attachment 215840 [details, diff] patch to source code
Created attachment 215841 [details, diff] patch to ebuild
+*avrdude-5.8-r1 (17 Nov 2010) + + 17 Nov 2010; Michael Weber <xmw@gentoo.org> +avrdude-5.8-r1.ebuild, + +files/avrdude-5.8-dragon-segfault.patch: + Revbump to include dragon-segfault.patch (bug #300312). +