texinfo 4.9 was released on 06/29/07. texinfo 4.11 was released on 09/10/07. the bump from 4.8-r5 to 4.9 is trivial, because all the patches still apply and (at least on my x86-macos) the test suite still passes. the bump from 4.8 to 4.11 is non-trivial - it doesn't compile out of the box (on x86-macos) and none of the patches applies. texinfo is GPL v3 as of v4.9.
Created attachment 132862 [details] proposed ebuild for 4.9
not interested in bumping for 4.9 ... it's just 4.8 moved to GPL-3
4.11 now in the tree