Using Eclasses

An eclass is a collection (library) of functions or functionality that is shared between packages. See for the full story on what eclasses can do, how they work and how to write them, and the eclass reference for documentation on various commonly used eclasses. This section only explains how to use an eclass which has already been written.

The <c>inherit</c> Function

To use an eclass, it must be 'inherited'. This is done via the inherit function, which is provided by ebuild.sh. The inherit statement must come at the top of the ebuild, before any functions. Conditional inherits are illegal (except where the inheritance criteria are cache-constant see ).

After inheriting an eclass, its provided functions can be used as normal. Here's an example ebuild, foomatic-0.1-r2.ebuild, which uses three eclasses:

# Copyright 1999-2018 Gentoo Foundation # Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 EAPI=7 inherit autotools bash-completion-r1 flag-o-matic DESCRIPTION="Tool for foo" HOMEPAGE="https://foomatic.sf.net" SRC_URI="mirror://sourceforge/${PN}/${P}.tar.gz" LICENSE="GPL-2" SLOT="0" KEYWORDS="alpha ~amd64 ~x86 ~x86-fbsd" RDEPEND="sys-libs/ncurses:0= >=sys-libs/readline:0=" DEPEND="${RDEPEND}" src_prepare() { eapply "${FILESDIR}/${P}-gentoo.patch" eapply_user eautoreconf } src_configure() { econf --sysconfdir="${EPREFIX}"/etc/devtodo } src_compile() { replace-flags -O? -O1 default } src_install() { default dobashcomp "${FILESDIR}/${PN}.bash-completion" ${PN} }

Note the inherit immediately after the header.

The autotools eclass (see autotools.eclass) is needed to get the eautoreconf function. The flag-o-matic eclass (see flag-o-matic.eclass) is needed for replace-flags, and the bash-completion-r1 eclass (bash-completion-r1.eclass) is used to handle the bash completion file via dobashcomp.