Hello,
the proposed changes have been applied to all ebuilds of dev-lang/python in Gentoo's main tree as of now. So it's in CVS now, mirrors take longer. If you stumble upon problems with it please - file bugs with details - reply here, pointing to the bug NOTE: If you plan to explicitly unmerge an older version of Python, you still may experience auto-updates of the active Python version do to calls to eselect_python_update() from pkg_postrm() of older ebuilds. Details follow. To be sure you can use this command: # fgrep -A 8 'eselect_python_update()' \ /var/db/pkg/dev-lang/python-*/python-*.ebuild You may either find nothing or one of these variants: A) The troublemaker doing updates eselect_python_update() { local eselect_python_options [[ "$(eselect python show)" == "python2."* ]] \ && eselect_python_options="--python2" # Create python2 symlink. eselect python update --python2 > /dev/null eselect python update ${eselect_python_options} } B) Its harmless successor eselect_python_update() { if [[ -z "$(eselect python show --python${PV%%.*})" ]]; then eselect python update --python${PV%%.*} fi } To fully solve this remaining problem we will have to touch eselect-python. Best, Sebastian