Some packages (like dev-libs/openct) depend on libltdl but not on libtool in general. Writing "libtool" into their RDEPEND will cause problems in embedded systems - it will pull a lot of redundant and never-used things. Note, that system being built with gentoo cross-tools is completly free of autotools or even bash. Reproducible: Always
So my personal €.02 would be to simply drop autoconf/automake from the RDEPEND of libtool… you can use part of it without them anyway, it's just the libtoolize stuff that uses them directly, then there is the macros… but in general, libtool can be quite standalone… And for the usage we have in Gentoo, we have explicit autoconf/automake deps when libtool is used as part of the build system, so it doesn't make much more sense to have them as to have them for pkg-config, IMHO.
Okay, since nobody else seems to have stepped in, I added a 2.4-r1 that does just what I said.
