There is a typo in the eselect binutils module (/usr/share/eselect/modules/binutils.eselect). The binutils package puts its data files in /usr/share/binutils-data, but the eselect module is looking in /usr/share/binutils-date.
This has been broken since the original version of binutils.eselect was written in 2005. See http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/eselect.git;a=commitdiff;h=9a01ae3b943a30aaf74eba45313c9edfd36a24ff . O_o
Ok I have performed some more investigation of this. It looks like eselect binutils is actually not getting used in favor of binutils-config. The reason I wasn't finding the man pages was because I had upgraded binutils a few days ago and still had the old MANPATH value in my X session (and since /etc/profile.env is only sourced for login shells, I actually have to restart my X session. grumble). So if the eselect binutils module is wrong and not being used, should it simply be deleted? Also I'm not sure what the story is with binutils' locale files, because I'm not sure any of the commands would know how to get at them. But that's probably a different bug. It would also be nice if profile.env were run for every terminal, but that's also a different issue.
Fixed in git: <http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/eselect.git;a=commit;h=e0534bb01ed5ef31170539f3d51929a14619ff1a>
Fixed in eselect-1.3.2. Thanks for reporting.
