Gentoo discovered an flaw [1] in the ioncore/Makefile.
Line 53 [2] should read $(CC) instead of gcc (for cross-compiling, clang, etc).
The RUNLIB/AR handling inside notion is fine.
[1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=465260
[2] http://notion.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=notion/notion;a=blob;f=ioncore/Makefile;h=59d1ed4291ac3bd0dce21f0e56228c15b2db7d92;hb=HEAD
Thanks! fixed in git.