I found this while bootstrapping a new system using corssdev. It's not related to cross compilation, it's really a missing dependency (see the freedesktop thread) ***** autoconf ***** ***** PWD: /usr/armv7a-hardfloat-linux-gnueabi/tmp/portage/sys-apps/dbus-1.12.2/work/dbus-1.12.2 ***** autoconf --force -I /usr/armv7a-hardfloat-linux-gnueabi/usr/share/aclocal configure.ac:95: error: Unexpanded AX_ macro found. Please install GNU autoconf-archive If this token and others are legitimate, please use m4_pattern_allow. See the Autoconf documentation. configure.ac:375: error: Unexpanded AX_ macro found. Please install GNU autoconf-archive configure.ac:1291: error: Unexpanded AX_ macro found. Please install GNU autoconf-archive configure.ac:1296: error: Unexpanded AX_ macro found. Please install GNU autoconf-archive configure.ac:1305: error: Unexpanded AX_ macro found. Please install GNU autoconf-archive configure.ac:1311: error: Unexpanded AX_ macro found. Please install GNU autoconf-archive Reference: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98093 Note that adding `--root-deps` does solve the problem, but doc do depend on `xmlto` and all of dbus directly depend on autoconf-archive so they should be added to the ebuild
$ grep -HE "(autoconf-archive|xmlto)" dbus*.ebuild dbus-1.10.18.ebuild: app-text/xmlto dbus-1.10.24.ebuild: app-text/xmlto dbus-1.12.0.ebuild: app-text/xmlto dbus-1.12.0.ebuild: sys-devel/autoconf-archive dbus-1.12.2.ebuild: app-text/xmlto dbus-1.12.2.ebuild: sys-devel/autoconf-archive I'm not sure I understand your bug report. dbus-1.10.x have xmlto in DEPEND and dbus-1.12.x also have autoconf-archive in DEPEND.
Umm, seems like you are right, this is due to crossdev emerge itself, `xmlto` have to be installed in both the host and the target for dbus to be installed. As for autoconf-archive, crossdev emerge does not install it unless --root-deps is specified, I am not sure in which component the issue is. Changing product to gentoo/alt
It's not a "Gentoo/Alt" issue; it's a consequence of the half-baked cross-compile support in portage. It might be fixed in some future EAPI.