[gentoo-dev] How to spread intltool fixes to all packages

[Pacho Ramos <pacho@gentoo.org>]

Hello

Because of:
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=432848

We discovered an old bug affecting intltool that causes prefix of
localedir to be always hardcoded to the same location instead of
respecting configure flags. 

The patch is fixed by intltool upstream in their master branch but still
no new version was released including it. Anyway, we now have
dev-util/intltool-0.50.2-r1 with the bug fixed.

The problem of this issue (and most involving intltool) is that we need
to run:
intltoolize --copy --automake --force
(it doesn't seem to trigger maintainer mode in all ebuilds I have tried,
then, doesn't look to require eautoreconf to be run)

for all packages to get new and fixed ${S}/po/Makefile.in.in copied to
the sources, otherwise bundled file is used and, then, the one unfixed.
As it's unreliable to ping all upstreams involving intltool (they are a
ton) and this kind of problem will likely re-appear again in the future
(since the Makefile.in.in will be fixed in intltool upstream tarball but
will take a lot of time to reach all affected packages) we were
considering to run above command always at eclass level -> that way we
would stop using bundled ${S}/po/Makefile.in.in and, then, we would
always use the one provided by our intltool package (that should get
fixed and updated more often).

Other possible solution would be to use ELT-PATCHES to achieve that, but
I am still unsure about how would it work.

What are your thoughts?