I should point out I am running Funtoo on amd64.

I tried starting akregator after some world updates and it just did not load. And got this error if starting it from the command line:

(KLibrary) kde4Factory: The library "/usr/lib64/kde4/akregatorpart.so" does not offer a qt_plugin_instance function.

After some research I realized that this is more of a warning and may not have anything to do with my problem. The backtrace wasn’t terribly helpful to me.
So I ran:

# emerge -pve akregator

merge: there are no ebuilds built with USE flags to satisfy ">=x11-libs/cairo-1.10.0[-qt4]".
!!! One of the following packages is required to complete your request:
- x11-libs/cairo-1.10.2-r1 (Change USE: -qt4)
(dependency required by "x11-libs/qt-gui-4.6.3-r2" [ebuild])
(dependency required by "kde-base/kontact-4.4.9" [ebuild])
(dependency required by "kde-base/akregator-4.4.9" [ebuild])
(dependency required by "akregator" [argument])

Something seems odd about that.

Perhaps this is all related to me moving what I had in:
/etc/portage/package.keywords/kde4
to another directory. Most of what I have installed is not keyworded any more. I did downgrade a few packages.

The main reason I had to do that because there was some funkiness with phonon trying to require the debug USE flag all of a sudden. I had started to think I had my packages in an unlikely state with a mix of old and new KDE. After removing the keywords and downgrading the 3 or so packages the debug flag issue was resolved. Okay, so back to akregator….

After trying to `emerge -pv` various qt packages I saw it really wanted cairo without the qt4 flag. Specifically it would do this with just “emerge -pv qt-gui.” That could be because qt-gui provides the needed files now or maybe there is just a weird dependency hell issue going on.
I added “x11-libs/cairo -qt4” to package.use and tried this:

# emerge -vD1 qt-gui cairo

Aha, now I’m getting somewhere. I can run `emerge -pve world` and it doesn’t report any conflicts. However `emerge -pvDe world` does.

I apparently need:

media-libs/libpng static-libs
media-libs/jpeg static-libs
virtual/jpeg static-libs
dev-libs/libgcrypt static-libs
dev-libs/popt  static-libs
dev-libs/libgpg-error static-libs

in package.use.

Suspicious but I’ll go for it. I suspect the static image libs are for boot splashscreen support. Why all of a sudden? I’m not sure I care.

So now I can run:

# emerge -aqvDe --jobs=2 --keep-going --backtrack=30 world

Yes, I have both q (quiet) and v (verbose) flags there. I don’t care if you don’t.
Also, usually if I don’t suspect any building problems I run more parallel “jobs” than that.

I started at 11pm on the spot. Only 1184 ebuilds to compile…
By the time it finished doing kdelibs (at 12:46am), and not before, I was able to start akregator.
kdelibs was number 273 of 1184 packages but I left it to keep running.

It’s so easy to get your libraries out of sync with your apps.