Now that elibtoolize verbosely complains about double use of elibtoolize, we should seriously consider supporting calling eautoreconf in our _src_prepare(). What I'd see is: 1) AUTOTOOLS_EAUTORECONF=1 to enable inheriting autotools and calling eautoreconf, 2) otherwise, we could just inherit autotools but without adding dependencies, 3) we may support calling additional tools like gtkdocize, intltoolize and so on, 4) we may support calling partial reconf _somehow_, 5) we may support user-patch triggered autoreconf -- but then user would be responsible for having correct automake/autoconf around.
One serious problem here is dependencies. If we inherit autotools all the time, we may add unnecessary dep on autoconf+automake. If we inherit it with AUTOTOOLS_AUTO_DEPEND=no, the rare case when user does 'inherit autotools-utils autotools' may fail to generate correct deps. Supporting additional tools would require grepping through configure.{ac,in}. This means that the tools will be known at build time, and we don't know whether to depend on them or not. Ebuild will need to list them explicitly prolly.
(In reply to comment #1) > One serious problem here is dependencies. > > If we inherit autotools all the time, we may add unnecessary dep on > autoconf+automake. If we inherit it with AUTOTOOLS_AUTO_DEPEND=no, the rare > case when user does 'inherit autotools-utils autotools' may fail to generate > correct deps. You can use in autotools-utils.eclass: AUTOTOOLS_AUTO_DEPEND="no" inherit autotools Remember that when A.eclass and B.eclass inherit C.eclass, then 'inherit A B C' in an ebuild will result in sourcing of C.eclass (at least) 3 times.
Another issue I'm hitting right now is that we need a little different autotool calling order. It is possible that we'll have to reimplement eautoreconf or get some changes into autotools.eclass.
*** Bug 395061 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
And done. If an ebuild wishes to use this, it has to: 1) export 'AUTOTOOLS_AUTORECONF=anything' before sourcing the eclass to ensure that autoconf&automake deps are added, 2) add any other necessary autoreconfiguration deps (those not handled by autotools.eclass) like gtk-doc, 3) and well, that's it. The autoreconfiguration will occur in autotools-utils_src_prepare().
