need a little help compiling from cvs

[Phil Fraering <pgf@globalreach.net>]

Hi. I'm a newbie to autoconf stuff and the like, and I need a
little help compiling gnome on debian.

To elucidate a little more, I recently reinstalled debian with
the object of using the debian install for some things, but to
install others, like the gnome packages, from scratch. However,
when I download something via cvs and try to run autoconf, there
are problems, such as:

 autoconf
 autoconf: Undefined macros:
 configure.in:186:AC_CHECK_UTMP
 
 
And running ./configure yields:

loading cache ./config.cache
./configure: line 536: syntax error near unexpected token
AM_CONFIG_HEADER(config.h)'
./configure: line 536: AM_CONFIG_HEADER(config.h)'

I'm new to this, can anyone help?

BTW, is there a better place to get source than the cvs for
the unstable branch (a stable version of the unstable branch,
as it were)? Maybe in bzip'd tarballs?

I'm putting everything in /usr/local and trying to manage it with
stow, BTW.

Phil
pgf@globalreach.net