PiotrAF wrote:

> After copying /etc/conf.d/saslauthd from [OLD] to [NEW] it starts working!

I didn't fight my way through everything you posted, but reading the
Changelog [1] could give you some hints why there are differences.

> What is going on? how is it possible that gentoo developers change ebuilds
> without renumbering versions?

Version bumping (e.g. r7->r8) is only done when there are non-trivial
changes or changes that affect _many_ people. See the other side: If every
little change in, say, the xfree-ebuild would result in a version bump,
many Gentoo users would spend much time re-compiling xfree for no reason.

> something VERY WRONG is going on in Gentoo
>

No :-)

[1] http://www.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/ \
viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/dev-libs/cyrus-sasl/ChangeLog