Recently, I've been trying to resurrect old porting attempts. I bought a SL-C3100 and SL-6000L, and got hem set up with the most functional pdaXrom distros I could put together.
Now that I've started compiling a few packages, I'm noticing that a lot of recently developed code will not build due to outdated tools. The main culprit seems to be m4, but others like autoconf are giving trouble as well. Trying to build the latest m4 from source has all kinds of recursive dependencies, so bootstrapping is required if I want to pull this off on the Z.
I think the only alternative at this point is going to be to set up a cross compile toolchain targeted at pdaXrom but built using a recent version of Ubuntu, or some other Debian-based distro.