Bugzilla Bug 4787

Dunno, is this a bug or a feature?  Anyway, it caused me a problem.

I 'upgraded' a machine to gcc-3.1 and then after a few weeks of fighting
with it I decided to 'upgrade' to gcc-2.95 again.

So I did the re-emerge of gcc-2.95 and rebuilt the entire system without
difficulty, and so I thought all was okay until avifile refused to compile
last week with an obvious c++ compiler error.

After poking around I was shocked to find that in addition to gcc-2.95.3-r7
I still had the entire gcc-3.1 *and* gcc-2.95.3-r5 still on the machine
completely intact.

The point is that I had done several "emerge clean"s in the meantime and
never saw any clues that I had multiple gcc's on the machine.  Is this
the intended behavior?

the various versions of gcc are allowed to co-exist, that is why you had them
on
your system.  If you wish to get rid of a specific version unmerge that
specific
version.

That said, if you look in the ebuilds themselves, you'll see that the two gcc
series have different SLOT values.  That is what tells the emerge system that
the older version of a package is not to be overwritten, but rather that it can
coexist with the new version.