While setting up a fresh installation of Gentoo to deploy to the cloud for remote dev work, I kept running into compilation errors with lxml.

The referenced snippet of code shown was the standard compilation line: “${@}” || die “${die_args[@]}” which means run the command and associated arguments or quit and show the associated arguments.

I went into the build directory to debug further.

# cd /var/tmp/portage/dev-python/lxml-4.3.3/lxml-4.3.3-python2_7/work/lxml-4.3.3-python2_7
# i686-pc-linux-gnu-gcc -O2 -march=native -pipe -fno-strict-aliasing -fPIC -DCYTHON_CLINE_IN_TRACEBACK=0 -I/usr/include/libxml2 -Isrc -Isrc/lxml/includes -I/usr/include/python2.7 -c src/lxml/etree.c -o /var/tmp/portage/dev-python/lxml-4.3.3/work/lxlm-4.3.3-python2_7/build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.7/src/lxml/etree.o -w

Which compiled without problems.

I emerged screen and then ran emerge –resume and managed to capture the error.

> Unknown psuedo op .str

I found a similar thread on the Gentoo forums and created a bigger swapfile as I was running out of memory.
# fallocate /swapfile -l 1GiB
# chmod 600 !$
# mkswap !$
# swapon !$

This solved the compilation issue.