Part of the work required to get a piece of software building in our build system is writing a recipe for it. A large part of this can be done by a script (assuming it has access to the source tree) rather than requiring users to do it by hand every time. We've had the scripts/create-recipe script for a while that was supposed to do exactly this, but it's far from perfect and being written in perl means it's not easy for us to maintain and extend.
One option here would be to port scripts/create-recipe to python. (Not only do we have much more in the way of expertise on python, but we can more closely integrate with the build system if we need to use it to query variable values or re-use code from it.)
See also bug 6561.
A new "recipetool" was added to master in the following commit (a number of earlier supporting commits are also required): http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/?id=5638ca2b9483806d991d93071b259769a5f7ec48 Documentation is still pending.
Some basic QA tests have been added in meta/lib/oeqa/selftest/devtool.py.
Verified on latest master (df0672b038e6942c97d266af9ca175a06f2b0423)