This case refers to tcpdump from openembedded layer meta-networking: https://github.com/openembedded/meta-oe/tree/master/meta-networking/recipes-support/tcpdump tcpdump builds fine under branch daisy. tcpdump fails at do_configure under branch master with file not found error, as follows /poky/build/tmp/work/armv7a-vfp-neon-poky-linux-gnueabi/tcpdump/master-4.3.0-r0$ more temp/log.do_configure DEBUG: Executing python function sysroot_cleansstate DEBUG: Python function sysroot_cleansstate finished DEBUG: SITE files ['endian-little', 'bit-32', 'arm-common', 'common-linux', 'common-glibc', 'arm-linux', 'arm-linux-gnueabi', 'common'] DEBUG: Executing shell function autotools_preconfigure DEBUG: Shell function autotools_preconfigure finished DEBUG: Executing python function autotools_copy_aclocals WARNING: /yocto/scepter/poky/build/tmp/sstate-control/manifest-x86_64-xproto-native.populate_sysroot not found WARNING: /yocto/scepter/poky/build/tmp/sstate-control/manifest-x86_64-xcb-proto-native.populate_sysroot not found WARNING: /yocto/scepter/poky/build/tmp/sstate-control/manifest-x86_64-util-macros-native.populate_sysroot not found DEBUG: Python function autotools_copy_aclocals finished DEBUG: Executing shell function do_configure sed: can't read ./configure.in: No such file or directory ---------- differences: After sorting the environment variables (helpful: maybe we should always do this), the diffs in run.do_configures are: /poky/build/tmp/work/armv7a-vfp-neon-poky-linux-gnueabi/tcpdump/master-4.3.0-r0$ diff temp/run.do_configure ../4.3.0-r0/temp/run.do_configure 137c137 < ACLOCAL="aclocal --system-acdir=/yocto/scepter/poky/build/tmp/work/armv7a-vfp-neon-poky-linux-gnueabi/tcpdump/4.3.0-r0/build/aclocal-copy/" --- > ACLOCAL="aclocal --system-acdir=/yocto/scepter/poky/build/tmp/work/armv7a-vfp-neon-poky-linux-gnueabi/tcpdump/4.3.0-r0/tcpdump-4.3.0/aclocal-copy/" 233c233 < cd '/yocto/scepter/poky/build/tmp/work/armv7a-vfp-neon-poky-linux-gnueabi/tcpdump/4.3.0-r0/build' --- > cd '/yocto/scepter/poky/build/tmp/work/armv7a-vfp-neon-poky-linux-gnueabi/tcpdump/4.3.0-r0/tcpdump-4.3.0' The new tcpdump/4.3.0-r0/build directory contains only aclocal-copy/, and was created in this commit: http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/meta/classes/autotools.bbclass?id=69b6eaca3d9b635e8a61a0fdbd814b558e91901d Reverting that change and rebuilding allows tcpdump to be built successfully. tcpdump_4.3.0.bb has a do_configure_prepend() and a do_configure_append() step, so the problem might be that tcpdump_4.3.0.bb is too brittle rather than anything wrong with autotools.bbclass. Please give me some feedback on that and I will try to fix tcpdump.
This is a conscious change to the core to require separate build and source directories for autotools (or force the use of the autotools-brokensep class instead), so technically this is an issue for the meta-networking layer that we don't track in this Bugzilla; so I'll mark this as resolved/invalid. However, as it happens a fix for tcpdump is in meta-openembedded master-next, and should be merged to master (and daisy when that branch arrives) very soon.