I stumbled across another ebuild today that used the upstream-provided bootstrap script to rebuild autotools.
Please refrain from using those if you can. Upstream doesn't always know better for our setup (it may try to second guess our settings by looking for particular automake/autoconf versions), it will show to the user information we don't care about, almost all the bootstrap scripts I've seen don't even try to catch when a step in the rebuild fails, they mask the need for autotools, and as you don't inherit autotools eclass for running them, you usually forget to add the autoconf/automake dependencies. And it makes very difficult to track down which ebuilds do actually use autotools to track down if there are changes to do. Let's not even start to talk about bootstrap scritps that run ./configure by themselves, those are just plainly evil. Please note that sometimes the bootstrap script is used to add extra m4 search directories and options like --foreign to automake. Well, here's the deal: - AT_M4DIR is the variable to use to pass extra m4 search directory to aclocal, no need for the bootstrap script; - eautomake takes care by itself to identify the cases where --foreign is needed (this usually means when some of the standard documentation files are missign); beside, if upstream is providing a bootstrap script for just these two reasons, then it's time they learn about ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS. Also make sure that autotools gets not rebuilt through maintainer mode, that will make the configure run twice, wasting users' time, and is usually evil if you are using unpack to check for the generated configure (yes it happened to me a couple of time). THANKS! -- Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò http://blog.flameeyes.eu/
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