My overall goal here is to run gnucash. Having tried and failed a few different ways (macports, fink etc.) I thought I'd start fresh with a clean installation and see what happened. I'm following JRalls instructions from http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/MacOSX/Quartz, so have download the .jhbuild-custom file from http://github.com/jralls/gnucash-on-osx/raw/master/.jhbuildrc-custom - I don't know if that's affecting things here or not as I've not got very far.

Here's what I've done so far: -

Start with new Mac OS X 10.4 installation and apply all software updates
Install Xcode 2.558 downloaded from apple
Install Subversion 1.60 universal binary from collab.net
edit "~/.profile" to add ":/opt/subversion/bin:/Users/mje/bin" to path
download gtk-osx-build-setup.sh into /Users/mje/
download http://github.com/jralls/gnucash-on-osx/raw/master/.jhbuildrc-custom into /Users/mje/
execute "sh gtk-osx-build-setup.sh" (no problems)
execute "jhbuild bootstrap"
Step 8 (didn't record what it was called) requires autoconf 2.60 or higher, so it all stops. I started a shell, downloaded http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.63.tar.gz and tried to build that, but it in turn requires a newer version of m4, so I downloaded http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.12.tar.gz, and built that.
For each of these I extracted the archive into its own directory and from that directory executed "./configure", followed by "make" and then "sudo make install". This didn't seem to do what I expected - which was to intall the binaries in /usr/bin/ so I renamed the original /usr/bin/m4 and /usr/bin/autoconf and moved the binaries to /usr/bin
Now I could continue and "jhbuild bootstrap" completes successfully

I tried to run "jhbuild build meta-gtk-osx-bootstrap", but it stops at
*** Checking out docbook-setup *** [2/13]
curl -L http://github.com/rhult/gtk-osx-docbook/tarball/DB_1 -o /Users/mje/gtk/source/pkgs/DB_1
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 1889k 100 1889k 0 0 187k 0 0:00:10 0:00:10 --:--:-- 274k
jhbuild build: failed to unpack /Users/mje/gtk/source/pkgs/DB_1

I know that this error is due to jhbuild using the old version of python but I thought that it had already been fixed to use the freshly-built python 2.5 (I vaguely recall a message flashing past at the begining mentioning python 2.3.5). I added ":/Users/mje/gtk/inst/bin" to the path in my ~/.profile and tried again, which worked fine.

So far so good, but I was wondering if these problems could be resolved within the build script - I'm rather new to this so I've not got my head around how things work enough yet to suggest a patch myself.

Later on things broke again - seemingly complaining that autoconf 2.60 was needed again, but it was late so I'll look into that another day.