oops, should have looked, bug 82601 is already open (says sparc only,
though) and that it is probably due to some other lib, not mkfontdir
code itself.
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=82601
They point out that this:
required from libc.so.6:
0x0d696911 0x00 05 GLIBC_2.1
0x0d696912 0x00 03 GLIBC_2.2
0x0d696910 0x00 02 GLIBC_2.0
(from objdump) is somewhat odd, and probably wrong...