[yocto] Confusion about autotools

[Patrick Doyle]

I am trying to write a recipe for a custom gstreamer plugin that
compiles fine (natively) with autotools.

I thought it would be as simple as writing a recipe that said something like:

inherit autotools

myplugin_do_fetch() {
    commands_to_make_a_copy_of_my_source_code_in_build_tree;
}
EXPORT_FUNCTIONS do_fetch

(I am leaving out the boilerplate DESCRIPTION, LICENSE, etc...

But when I try to run my recipe, I get an error that ends like:

109: /home/wpd/.../run.do_fetch.1234 do_fetch: not found

and when I look at run.do_fetch, I see on line 109

do_fetch

I thought that do_fetch would be inherited from base.bbclass.  I look
in autotools.bbclass and I don't see a do_fetch function task defined
there.

So now I'm confused.  Since this isn't working the way I thought it
would, I figured it was time (once again -- and thanks for all of the
help so far!) to ask the list how I should do this.

For purely hysterical reasons, the gst plugin is in the same (bzr)
repository and my yocto build environment.  I was expecting to write a
"do_fetch()" task that would copy the source files into the
appropriate location in build tree.

I guess I could create a subdirectory of the recipe that contains a
bunch of symbolic links to each of the source files required to build
the plugin, and list them all as file:whatever in SRC_URI.  But that
feels hackish.

Once again, any tips to help over this hump (and help me make it to
the big important demo next week) would be welcome.

--wpd