Neil Bothwick wrote:
On Thu, 4 Jun 2020 23:42:50 +0100, Ashley Dixon wrote:


Providing he's just adding the line to a package.use file with  a  text
 editor, that's just manually doing the work of etc-update.  We need
the  `emerge  --info docutils` output to see full information about his
Python environment.

Except that etc-update also adds a backtrace as comments, allowing him to
trace the cause.

That backtrace is in the OP's original post.  The first one doesn't give much of one, none really.  The second one gives a list of packages.  Either way, it was a circular problem.  It seems the emerge --info for the package gave the clue which I don't see anywhere in the output of emerge. 

Dale

:-)  :-)