Autotools

Autotools is a build system used commonly in open source projects.

= Eclasses related to autotools =

autotools.eclass
autotools eclass provides functions and dependencies necessary to reconfigure (bootstrap) autotools files in packages. These are usually used in live ebuilds and when applying patches to configure.ac or Makefile.am files.

Example ebuild code using autotools.eclass

The eautoreconf function, similarly to autoreconf -vi, regenerates configure and template files used by autotools. It automatically detects use of automake, libtool, autoheader and subdirectory recursion, and calls the appropriate commands.

Much like autoreconf, it doesn't handle gettext, gtk-doc and other custom bootstrap steps necessary. For the former case, there's additional eautopoint function; for the latter, it is suggested to call the appropriate tool through autotools_run_tool (which prints a nice status message).

Example bootstrap using gettext and gtk-doc