Autoconf problems

["Nolan J. Darilek" <nolan ethereal dyndns org>]

I've somehow gotten gnopernicus past the errors which plagued me for
months. Hazarding an uneducated guess makes me suspect Debian's
formerly-outdated atk/gail/cspi packages. I'd installed fresh CVS
checkouts, but apparently Debian's GTK packages were linking to the
"official" versions instead.

Now I'm having autoconf problems with the latest CVS checkout,
automake 1.73 and autoconf 2.57. Specifically, configure runs fine
until:

checking for ISO C99 varargs macros in C... yes
checking whether to enable ipv6... no
configure: error: conditional "am__fastdepCXX" was never defined.
Usually this means the macro was only invoked conditionally.

A quick google search reveals the following:

http://sources.redhat.com/ml/bug-automake/2002/msg02066.html

Though, unfortunately, my autoconf skills are limited to running
autoheader/autoconf/automake/libtool and making very basic edits. :)

I've also experienced autoconf problems with the latest CVS checkout
of gnome-speech:

checking for eciNew in -libmeci50... yes
checking for TextToSpeechSync in -ltts... no
./configure: line 8707: syntax error near unexpected token `('
./configure: line 8707: `  echo $ECHO_N "(cached) $ECHO_C" >&6'

Any idea as to what may be causing either of these?

Thanks.