No, I checked out, then I believe I ran the autogen.sh script, after that I did the 'fakeroot debian/rules binary' routine (there are other methods but this is the one I use on debian systems, so I've kept using it for maemo too. It runs configure, make, and creates the final .deb(s)).

When doing this it would first complain about some missing packets. After installing those it would get as far as starting to compile. Then I would run into some compilation problems which actually forced me to fix some code, but that may be mainly because I was building an OS2007 version at the time, with a fix that I made in order to get bluetooth GPS working again for N800.

Other than this it was straight sailing, and it's strange that you seem to have a problem with the libgdbm package. You could try 'apt-get install libgdbm-dev --reinstall' (from inside scratchbox)