Hmmh, it's been a decade or two since I used the autotools last, so I'll need a hint. I find it slightly disturbing that the README file is of little help though.

Further, if I try naively $ sh -x ./autogen.sh then that fails on a dependency on libtoolize, of which I never have heard of and which doesn't seem to be known to bananian.

libtoolize is a program provided by the libtool package. It's pretty common in the GNU ecosystem, and is used for managing some of the more subtle aspects of build-time and runtime linking.

Agreed that the README needs much better documentation of the package-time dependencies (autoconf, automake, m4, perl, etc), and the build-time dependencies (libtool, libgc, plus a bunch of other libraries).

Yeah, that was just my ignorance which a quick search on the Imterwebs remedied. With the bananian (Debian) package 'libtool' installed (and flex and libunistring-dev)

$ sh -x ./autogen.sh completes successfully and I got a ./configure and a INSTALL file (don't recall having seen an INSTALL file be autogenerated, but my memory might very well be failing me there). The './configure' also completes successfully (after a while -- seems like autoconfigure still believes that there are other Unices besides Linux left ;-} but 'make' eventually fails with

--8<-- [..] CC libguile_3.0_la-intrinsics.lo CC libguile_3.0_la-ioext.lo CC libguile_3.0_la-jit.lo jit.c:232:1: error: initializer element is not constant static const jit_gpr_t THREAD = JIT_V0; ^ jit.c:237:1: error: initializer element is not constant static const jit_gpr_t SP = JIT_R0; ^ [..] -->8--

I'll try again with 3.1 ...

I ran into some trouble on Ubuntu 18.04 / AMD64, but it's fixable. I never saw the error you saw, but perhaps this will still be helpful.

I used the release from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/guile/guile-3.0.0.tar.gz (linked from https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/download/ )

It's a release file so it includes the configure script out of the box. To install the build dependencies:

    sudo apt-get install libtool libgmp-dev libiconv-dev libltdl-dev libgc-dev libffi libffi-dev libunistring-dev pkg-config

After running sudo make install I tried to run guile, but it complained about not finding a .so file. A symlink fixed it:

    sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/libguile-3.0.so.1 /usr/lib/

After this, it worked. Perhaps fire up a fresh Bash for good measure.

Unrelated: I can't use the history in the Guile REPL though - if I press the up key, I get garbage rather than my previous line.

Oops, fixed command for installing dependencies:

    sudo apt-get install -y libtool libgmp-dev libltdl-dev libgc-dev libffi-dev libffi-dev libunistring-dev pkg-config