CVS trunk build failure on RedHat 9

[Robert Mecklenburg]

I just checked out the trunk from savannah and ran autoreconf -i -s as
instructed in the README.cvs and got this error:

$ autoreconf -i -s
...
Makefile.am: required file `./README' not found
configure.in:380: required file `./build.sh.in' not found
Makefile.am: installing `config/compile'
Makefile.am:3: installing `./ansi2knr.c'
Makefile.am:3: installing `./ansi2knr.1'
Makefile.am: installing `config/depcomp'
doc/Makefile.am:6: installing `config/texinfo.tex'
autoreconf: automake failed with exit status: 1

The configure went fine, it seems, then I ran step three "make update"
and got:

address@hidden make]$ make update
wget --passive-ftp --non-verbose ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/config/config.guess -O 
./config/config.guess
No such file `config.guess'.

Looking on ftp.gnu.org we see that gnu/config contains
config.guess.back-RNS.README indicating the file has been pulled due
to the recent unpleasantness on ftp.gnu.org.  Mindlessly forging ahead
I run "make" and get:

...
make[3]: Entering directory `/home/mecklen/src/make/trunk/make/po'
/usr/local/bin/msgmerge --update da.po make.pot
/usr/local/bin/msgmerge: error while opening "da.po" for reading: No such file 
or directory
make[3]: *** [da.po] Error 1
make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/mecklen/src/make/trunk/make/po'
make[2]: *** [stamp-po] Error 2
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/mecklen/src/make/trunk/make/po'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/mecklen/src/make/trunk/make'
make: *** [all] Error 2


I'm a newbie at building from the cvs source, what have I done wrong?
Or should I just wait until config.guess returns?

$ uname -a
Linux gandalf 2.4.20-6 #1 Thu Feb 27 10:06:59 EST 2003 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
$ autoreconf --version
autoreconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.57
...
$ automake --version
automake (GNU automake) 1.7.7
...
$ gettext --version
gettext (GNU gettext) 0.11.4
...

Thanks,
-- 
Robert