[gentoo-dev] Fixing broken libtool/autotools handling

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

Okay I suppose this was already in the TODO list of at least blubb and az but 
they don't seem to have time, neither I do, but at least I'll try to put this 
thing written down.

Currently we lack an "automated" way to fix packages that has broken or unsafe 
handling of autotools or libtool.
The elibtoolize function -that should be called by every package that uses 
libtool to build shared libraries- applies a series of patches to sanitize 
the behaviour of libtool in some cases (for example to support uclibc or 
Gentoo/FreeBSD).

Unfortunately, using elibtoolize requires

a) that the packages actually run it;
b) a lot of patches to be put inside portage.

This doesn't really scale too well, and it was proposed to merge elibtoolize 
inside portage, so that it can be run automatically, but that was a problem 
because it requires either to ship the patches within portage, or to make 
portage aware of its tree's structure, or to make portage call the eclass.

Another proposed solution (by blubb iirc) was to make elibtoolize a package by 
itself, shipping patches with it, and make portage depend on it.

I actually like this solution, but I would think it should be extended to fix 
generically known broken behaviours of configure scripts that might be 
related to broken tests. An example could be the tests that relies on 
implicit declarations like of exit() that breaks when using stuff 
like -Werror-implicit-declarations, or to broken config.* stuff...

Comments, thoughts?

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://dev.gentoo.org/~flameeyes/
Gentoo/Alt lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, AMD64, Sound, PAM, KDE