Thanks for input, gives me an idea of some of my bad habits.
I had instinctively put "media-libs/aalib -gpm" in package.use. I have never used "USE="*" emerge something".
Wasn't sure if
./.libs/libaa.so: undefined reference to `Gpm_Wgetch'
was the the failure of compiling aalib or not. Now off to figure out this reporting bug thing. Also since I did not oneshot that package, should I remove it then -auDN @world and let it get pulled back in as a dependency?