Frank Peters posted on Sat, 17 Oct 2009 19:02:15 -0400 as excerpted:

> Recently, after an emerge I will sometimes see this message in bold red
> colors:
> 
> !!! CANNOT IMPORT HTTP.CLIENT: cannot import name HTTPSConnection
> 
> Everything functions normally and there are no problems with anything
> else.  But why the message?  The source of the message is the portage
> getbinpkg.py file, but I don't know the purpose of this file.

getbinpkg.py would do what its name implies, check for binary packages.  
Standard from-source emerging should work fine, as you noted it seems to, 
but if you run FEATURES=buildpkg as I do, or otherwise have binary 
packages available, it's likely you'll have trouble merging them when you 
try.

The problem is likely related to portage's interaction with python.  Do 
you have both python-3 and python 2.5 or 2.6 merged?  The newest versions 
of python packages and portage itself should work fine in that case, but 
the fixes necessary to make it work are fairly recent, so you may have to 
remerge various python packages (some may require the newest ~arch 
version) so they setup modules for both python 3 and python 2.x -- 
formerly they only setup modules in whatever python happened to be the 
system python at the time.

But if you don't bother with binary packages anyway, at least that 
message shouldn't be an issue for you, you should be able to simply 
ignore it.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman