Why the hick are there so much versions of autoconf (in system)? Well, somewhere in the [Nasty bug..] thread someone (again) mentioned, that different packaged depend on different versions of autoconf. That's NOT the truth for building a package.
You're making some assumptions here... Part of the emerge process applies many patches to the original package.
Sometimes these patches are applied to the configure.in and makefile.in scripts. When changes like this are made, autoconf & automake are called to rebuild the configure script before it is executed.
And because the original package used autoconf version x.yz, x.yz is needed to rebuild the configure script appropriately for the package. Depending upon the release time, an older version of autoconf was used, and therefore the older version of autoconf is a dependency and is installed in a slot.
It's really not a big deal to get upset over. The autoconf and automake packages are pretty small, so they don't take up a lot of disk nor do they really require any attention on your part. Portage will ensure the correct versions are available for building packages, and there's really nothing that you, as the gentoo user, would need to do about it.
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