When creating a recipe for texlive I have noticed that this project is a distribution of several other subprojects, each of them having its own autotools tree. All of them are connected by the top-level autotools scripts.

When trying to build texlive with yocto/bitbake the configure script runs and completes successfully, however a subsequent run of 'make' will just go through some directories and finish quickly stating that it has nothing to do. No files are being compiled.

After some investigation I have found out that the autotools.bbclass tries to forcefully recreate the autotools scripts using autoreconf. The problem is that in order to do this it deletes all 'configure' scripts from directories, where it finds an accompanying 'configure.ac' or 'configure.in' file. It then performs executes 'autoreconf', however only in the root directory. This effectively means that all autotools subprojects are broken.

As a workaround I have deleted all 'configure.in' and 'configure.ac' files before executing 'do_configure' from autotools.bbclass to prevent it from rebuilding the autotools scripts and texlive compiled successfully.

I think autotools.bbclass should be consistent in what it does. Either it should only delete the top-level 'configure' script or it should recursively recreate all autotools subprojects. Eventually it could also offer some means of configuration via a variable so that the recipe can prepare a list of subprojects where 'autoreconf' should be run.