Mixing use of autotools-utils.eclass with regular phase functions and/or random econf/emake calls is unsupported and it never was. And in a near future, it will cause fatal errors during the build process. Please fix it by using correct autotools-utils phase functions as pointed out in the example on top of the eclass and/or its manpage. If you have any trouble, feel free to ping us and we'll help you fix it. Thanks.
27 Nov 2011; Justin Lecher <jlec@gentoo.org> libexplain-0.45.ebuild, files/libexplain-0.45-configure.patch, libexplain-0.46.ebuild, libexplain-0.47.ebuild, libexplain-0.49.ebuild: Remove mixing of default phase functions with autotool-utils ones, #392177