The document at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/mysql-upgrade-slotted.xml does not mention that automake-1.8* is required to install mysql-5.0.18-r30. I originally had only automake-1.9 installed and the merge failed looking for aclocal-1.8. After merging automake-1.8* all went well. I believe this is because Makefile.in in the mysql-5.0.18-r30 source was built with automake-1.8* Mentioning this in the document will spare others the research into the issue.
Not a docs bug, this is something that should be fixed and not mentioned about.
(In reply to comment #0) > I originally had only automake-1.9 installed and the merge failed looking for > aclocal-1.8. After merging automake-1.8* all went well. Not possible on a sane system. automake-wrapper depends on all slotted versions of automake. RDEPEND="=sys-devel/automake-1.4* =sys-devel/automake-1.5* =sys-devel/automake-1.6* =sys-devel/automake-1.7* =sys-devel/automake-1.8.5-r3 =sys-devel/automake-1.9*"