Just yesterday I was doing an upgrade of my Tomcat installation (and nearly everything on my virtual machine for that matter) and re-emerging the Tomcat servlet API kept giving me the error “unresolved symbol PyUnicodeUCS2_DecodeUTF8” and told me to re-emerge pyxml. It turns out that pyxml is fine and thanks to a lone comment on the Gentoo bug tracker I found a solution. Gentoo may break from time to time but their bug tracker is truly gold when you hit upon the right bug and the right comments.

Step 1: Run “emerge —sync”

Step 2: Update your packages as usual (I run “emerge —update —deep —newuse -av world” but people tell me I’m crazy, it can break LOTS of things if you don’t know what you’re doing)

Step 3: Wait for the unresolved symbol error to halt the emerge process and then run “emerge -1 javatoolkit”

Step 4: Repeat step 2 and you should be in the clear