gEDA: Problem with building from CVS

[sdb-at-NOSPAMcloud9_dot_net (Stuart Brorson)]

Hi Guys --

Just a quick note.  

Because I made changes in gattrib, I recently removed my local copy of
geda/devel/ and did a complete re-install of the CVS stuff (i.e. cvs
co geda/devel).  I've had problems rebuilding the new stuff.  I have
overcome the problems; I record my fixes here for future Googlers, as
well as to tip off the gEDA developers that some things might need
optimizing.  Problems:

1.  While configuring libgeda, configure bombs out, saying:

checking for libgdgeda-config... no
./configure: line 21421: syntax error near unexpected token
`libgdgeda,'
./configure: line 21421: `     PKG_CHECK_MODULES(libgdgeda, libgdgeda
>= 2.0.15)'
make: *** [libgeda/config.h] Error 2

The problem is that autoconf isn't expanding the "PKG_CHECK_MODULES"
m4 macro during the "make reconfig" stage.  It can't expand the macro
since it hasn't found the latest m4 directory.  Configure for gschem
also bombs out due to a "GNU_GETTEXT" macro not being expanded.
Here's the fix: 

     1.  Do "locate pkg.m4".
     2.  Do "setenv ACLOCAL_FLAGS "-I <pkg.m4 directory>".
     3.  Start building gEDA again.

I don't know what changed, or why autoconf can't find this directory
anymore.  This used to work, and I am using the latest autoconf.  Any
ideas? 

2.  After finally getting everything to build, I found that gschem
would segfault upon startup, and when I ran gattrib on an existing
design, gattrib would complain that it couldn't find any symbol
attributes.  This error message indicates that the schematic readin
wasn't loading the OBJECT data structure(s) correctly.

I examined libgeda.so as configured in my geda-install/lib directory.
Everything looked OK, but I surmised that my programs were loading the
wrong .so anyway.  OTOH, running "ldd gschem" showed it linking
against the correct libgeda.so.  Nonetheless, I deleted my entire
geda-install directory, and rebuilt & reinsalled gEDA.  This time
everything worked. 

Any ideas what happened?  

Stuart