While stripping symbols to conserve space, Portage strips out symbols that ld needs to link static libraries. This doesn't incapacitate the system, as everything is dynamically linked by default, but when you DO want something statically linked, you'll get "unresolved reference" errors that just don't make sense. This can be predictably reproduced simply by adding "-static" to LDFLAGS and compiling just about anything that links to a library that's available on the system in static form. It can be worked around by adding FEATURES="nostrip" to your make.conf and recompiling all the affected libraries.
the only time ive seen problems with stripping static archives is when users LDFLAGS were flaky or when the toolchain was doing things wrong the default strip flags --strip-unneeded is sane
This is invalid.
Closing due to old age