No desktop menu in Gentoo's CVS ebuild

[Andrew Conkling]

Some time ago (probably on Mon, 02 Aug 2004 14:27:57 -0400)
"Brian J. Tarricone" <bjt23 at cornell.edu> had the occasion to say the following:
> either that, or your locate database hasn't gotten updated properly 
> since you installed it. the menu is built by default, not sure why it 
> wouldn't build or install.  try it again, with a clean tree, and pay 
> special attention to configure and make output (make sure configure says 
> it's being built, and make sure 'make' goes into modules/menu/ when 
> building).

How do I "pay special attention"?  Is there a way I can capture output (I'm thinking '&> file') and then use an editor/grep to search for specific strings?