the gettext package and its implicit vcs has been a problem for us for time 
immemorial (one of the first documented instances is Bug 55607 dated Jun 
2004).  at the time, we really had no way of handling this cleanly.  but with 
USE deps now, i think we address this somewhat sanely.

background: the gettext package supports older versions of itself while 
minimizing disk space by storing the deployable files in a vcs archive.  this 
is only used at runtime if you run `autopoint`, and that is only used during 
development where the bundled gettext files in a package need to be recreated.  
in the past, it only used cvs, but now it supports both cvs and git (which are 
detected when gettext is emerged).  in the past, we just forced the smallish 
random packages that actually ran autotools to depend on cvs themselves.

what i'm proposing now is that we add a local USE flag (Nick proposed 
"autopoint") to sys-devel/gettext.  something like:
RDEPEND="autopoint? (
		git? ( dev-vcs/git )
		!git? ( cvs? ( dev-vcs/cvs ) )
		!cvs? ( dev-vcs/git )
	)"
idea is that we want to prefer git over cvs.  now other packages can DEPEND on 
sys-devel/gettext[autopoint].  perhaps even extend autotools.eclass with a 
variable to indicate people are going to be using eautopoint ...

any counter proposals/etc... ?
-mike