Hi Thien-Thi Nguy, Building guile branch_release-1-8 (git 99cc1f9ded13a3a3adc6766e0c04e690937c8830) fails on my system based on openSuSE Tumbleweed.
autogen.sh generates a broken configure script, although I upgraded to autoconf 2.71. This does not seem to be a problem of autoconf 2.71 or the rest of the toolchain as building current guile 'master' does succeed with the same setup and building earlier versions of guile 1.8 (e.g. 6c76a42de1d33c8306db3ce958899b5f0216c240) does suceed with autoconf 2.69 too. Knut