Many thanks to qole and Tigerite. Things went very smoothly by following all suggestions through qole's last post, and Tigerite has consolidated them nicely.

Anyway, the problem for me has always been making changes that require the rerunning of autoconf and/or automake. I've had some luck by soft linking stuff (i.e. automake1.8 -> automake, not automake1.4 -> automake), but generally, I have to bootstrap these kind of changes in scratchbox, and then copy the project over.

So, it would be the ultimate cool if someone had a recipe for properly installing and configuring the auto build stuff.

But again, qole and Tigerite rock the house.