I'm actually wondering this. Most of the tree requires autotools being installed, there's no way round this, as they change configure.ac and Makefile.am to fix bugs and similar.
Currently we're supposed to check which versions of tools are being ran and then add the approriate deps to the package. Sometimes this is difficult, sometimes it's just misrepresentation as they can work with newer versions, too, and so on. While it would be interesting to get rid of some versions of autotools from portage, I wouldn't think this is possible in a near future... or even in a not-so-near future, unless all upstreams applies our patches, and people start moving to something else. I'm wondering if we shouldn't just drop the idea of having precise deps on that part, and make simpler maintenance, that's already enough of an hell when dealing with autotools, by adding the DEPEND on the wrapper directly on the eclass. That would also solve the problem of dependency on sys-devel/libtool that's already missed by many many packages. It's a compromise, we trade perfectly stated deps for a lot of easyness for devs.. It's not a perfect world, you all know. Comments? -- Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://dev.gentoo.org/~flameeyes/ Gentoo/ALT lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, AMD64, Sound, PAM, KDE
pgpPNsybMgQ6S.pgp
Description: PGP signature
