writing as following does not take effect in gnome2.eclass, PATCHES=( "${FILESDIR}"/${PN}-3.0.3-zlib-1.2.5.2.patch ) It would be great to add this support, thanks Reproducible: Always
It is sad that the logic to handle this is spread in so many eclasses yet each have their own little differences. I think for gnome2.eclass, the best alternative is to check if we can use autotools-utils src_prepare as it has a nice logic for checking if autoreconf is needed and also handles epatch_user. The rest of the phases are more questionable as it would introduce out-of-source builds and a few other features that we might want to avoid for now.
We will simply rely on builtin functionality with eapi6 as soon as eclasses are updated for that eapi
