If emerging m4 without perl installed on the system, all goes well until the install phase, when you get: /var/tmp/portage/sys-devel/m4-1.4.17/work/m4-1.4.17/build-aux/missing: /usr/bin/makeinfo: /usr/bin/perl: bad interpreter: No such file or directory It would appear that m4 needs to have perl as a build dependency, or its build process needs to be adjusted not to use it.
(In reply to lperkins from comment #0) > If emerging m4 without perl installed on the system, all goes well until the > install phase, when you get: > > /var/tmp/portage/sys-devel/m4-1.4.17/work/m4-1.4.17/build-aux/missing: > /usr/bin/makeinfo: /usr/bin/perl: bad interpreter: No such file or directory /usr/bin/makeinfo comes from sys-apps/texinfo. So your removal of perl, which is not a good thing to do with autotools, broke texinfo which does have a dependency on perl.