Comment by simoncion

> Last time I tried Gentoo desktop I ended up with 8 separate autotools versions, and gcc & glibc was not that far behind in count.

When was this?

AFAIK, you simply can't end up with more than one glibc version as that package hasn't had multiple Slots. [0] GCC is Slotted but I can't remember a time when there were more than three or four Slots defined for it. IME, it's rare for a package to declare an upper bound on GCC version, but it does happen. It's definitely true that there are many Slots for the various autotools tools.

[0] A "Slot" defines a particular subset of package versions that can be installed alongside other "Slots" of the same package. For example, every sys-kernel/gentoo-sources version has its own Slot, every minor version of dev-lang/python [1] has its own Slot, etc, etc, etc.

[1] ...that is, 3.9, 3.10, 3.11...