This package (samba) has been modified from upstream Gentoo due to multiple changes necessary for use in Chrome OS. These changes include:
Although some of these changes could be upstreamed, such as cross-compilation fixes, it is unlikely that all changes necessary for Chrome OS could be submitted to upstream Gentoo. Therefore it is unliklely this package could be moved back to portage-stable.
When uprevving Samba things may have changed enough that a new cross-compile will fail (eg. emerge-kevin or emerge-kevin64 for ARM / ARM64 ends up failing where the x86_64 build does not) because the existing answers file (files/arm*_waf_config_answers) does not contain sufficient information. This is normally discovered because the build will fail with an error from the Portage sandbox that open_wr() on the answers file has failed.
If this occurs, rerun emerge, but prefix the command with:
FEATURES=“-usersandbox” emerge- samba
This will allow WAF to write the (new, unanswered) config options into the answers file at which point you can go and find answers for them (instructions for that in the file itself).
Once nothing remains unanswered the FEATURES="" prefix is no longer required as WAF can simply read the file instead of appending to it.
Some of the Samba packages also use the cross-compilation answers, however, these do not deviate from their upstream other than the {arm,arm64}_waf_config_answers. To facilitate this they are spread across both portage-stable and chromiumos-overlay, such that the WAF answers exist in chromiumos-overlay and the ebuild (and related patches) exist in portage-stable. This applies currently to sys-libs/ldb and sys-libs/tdb. This is required to ensure the WAF build system can read the patches, if they are in the same directory (i.e. both in portage-stable) this will manifest itself in failing the small C program configuration step.