Gentoo Portage and downgrading to older packages

All in the day of the life of an open source system.

Often I find myself using the time machine to discover whether some new install is the problem or something it depends isn't responding as expected.

So you want something older than curl 7.16 out of the portage tree? Use the less than (<) symbol:

emerge -av "<net-misc/curl-7.16.0"