I had a gut-feeling using slots to quickly switch between different versions of PHP in Gentoo would be straightforward and it was.  The only piece of the puzzle that eluded me for a while, in the end, was working out how to tell portage to install a specific version. This is acheieved with an equals sign. As such: (Assuming in this instance 5.2 is already installed.)

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As a developer, one of the great things I love about Gentoo (Linux distribution with BSD 'ports-like' package management) is the feeling it gives you that eveything you do to your system has an undo button. (For the record, I have at least come to my senses about this need in a production situation.)  A great example of this is layman, which I think is fair to say is a slightly more intuitive version of managing an apt sources file.  Today I realised there is a portage overlay (for use with layman) that I have been missing out on and perhaps it's because it's a fairly recent addition but it comes just in time for me to try and get more serious about hacking in Perl.

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