Aha. I know whats wrong here. In x11/gnome-panel/Makefile we have no
.include "../../x11/gnome2-control-center/buildlink3.mk"
yet in x11/gnome-panel/buildlink3.mk, we do have that line.
So what happens is the bulk build system looks at whats needed to build
x11/gnome-panel and gnome2-control-center is not listed so its not ending
up in the dependency tree. However, when something includes the gnome-panel
buildlink3.mk file, all of a sudden there is a dependency on
gnome2-control-center.
Now, if anyone has a fast machine and can check this out, I'd appreciate it.
It will probably take my aging system a week to compile all this stuff to
verify its ok even though I'm pretty certain the fix we want is to add
.include "../../x11/gnome2-control-center/buildlink3.mk"
to x11/gnome-panel/Makefile