Just an addendum to this... it went in, will be available in 
2.0.51_rc4 and up.

If you want all registered death funcs to kick in,

EBUILD_DEATH_HOOKS="$EBUILD_DEATH_HOOKS the_name_of_your_func"

or if you want just your func to run

EBUILD_DEATH_HOOKS="the_name_of_your_func"

CC'ing gentoo-dev, since I'd expect some devs would be interested in 
it.
~harring

On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 11:48:01AM -0500, Brian Harring wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 04:33:17PM +0000, Thomas Matthijs wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I would really like a way to echo more information when a die happens so
> > the users can paste it in their bug report
> > 
> > Only needs a very simple change to ebuild.sh:
> > 
> EBUILD_DEATH_HOOKS=''
> 
>  diefunc() {
>         local funcname="$1" lineno="$2" exitcode="$3"
>         shift 3
> @@ -289,6 +291,7 @@
>         echo "!!! ${*:-(no error message)}" >&2
>         echo "!!! If you need support, post the topmost build error, NOT this status message." >&2
>         echo >&2
> +	for x in $EBUILD_DEATH_HOOKS; do
> +		${x} "$1" "$2" "$3"
> +       done
>         exit 1
>  }
> ^^^ something like that I think is a bit better; passing the diefunc 
> args to the hooks also.
> ~harring