How does it fail? Which version of the different autotools (libtool, autoconf,
automake)?

/home/devel/sources/gstreamer/autogen.sh --prefix /home/devel/install --
--disable-plugin-builddir --disable-tests --disable-static --disable-gtk-doc
+ getting common from cvs
There is something wrong with your source tree.
You are missing common/gst-autogen.sh
cvs checkout: No CVSROOT specified!  Please use the `-d' option
cvs [checkout aborted]: or set the CVSROOT environment variable.

It fails before using any auto* so I dont think it's relevant. Anyway, I'm using
jhbuild so I have every auto* jhbuild bootstrap installs.

if test ! -f common/gst-autogen.sh

The autogen script seem to assume that we are ever building inside source directory.

I think this is a valid assumption.  You can, of course, run configure from a
non-source directory, but not any of the autotools.

Yeah, but I think the autogen.sh scripts should take care of it. It should cd to
the source directory when running auto* and then cd back to the build dir before
running configure. That's how gnome-autogen.sh works (and all the other
autogen.sh in my GNOME tree).

Thomas, any comments on this?

I didn't think it was possible at all to run automake etc from outside the
source directory. Anyway, assigning to thomas!

Marco,

a patch would be accepted, but it's not a high priority for me.

Note that you can do:

./autogen.sh --noconfigure
cd build
../configure

Given the --noconfigure option, marking as NOTABUG.