You receive this bug because this package does not respect my system's AR (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-ar) and calls directly /usr/bin/ar The possible solutions to fix this issue are: 1)Fix the buildsystem, if you can; 2)inherit toolchain-funcs and use tc-export AR 3)inherit toolchain-funcs and use emake AR="$(tc-getAR)" From the build log: ar cru ext/apache2/module_libpassenger_common.a ext/apache2/module_libpassenger_common/Logging.o ext/apache2/module_libpassenger_common/Utils/MD5.o ext/apache2/module_libpassenger_common/LoggingAgent/FilterSupport.o ext/apache2/module_libpassenger_common/Utils/Base64.o ext/apache2/module_libpassenger_common/AccountsDatabase.o ext/apache2/module_libpassenger_common/Utils.o ext/apache2/module_libpassenger_common/Utils/StrIntUtils.o ext/apache2/module_libpassenger_common/Utils/IOUtils.o ext/apache2/module_libpassenger_common/Utils/SystemTime.o ext/apache2/module_libpassenger_common/AgentBase.o ext/apache2/module_libpassenger_common/AgentsStarter.o ext/apache2/module_libpassenger_common/Utils/CachedFileStat.o
This is now fixed in passenger 4.0.23.