Rob, how do you do debug builds (-O0 -g) with the setup build infrastructure? Setting things like 'CFLAGS=-O0 -g' on the configure command line don't really work, since it looks like you have such values hardcoded in the Makefile.am &/| configure.in's. Are you simply changing these hardcoded values and re-bootstrap.sh'ing?
-- Gary R. Van Sickle Brewer. Patriot.