See: http://blogs.testbit.eu/timj/2006/09/28/28092006-hammering-the-intltool-trouble/ (page moved)
So I’ve finally had enough trouble with kludging around the different bits and odds of intltool. For several years now, the Beast project has to maintain a patch against intltool to apply after intltoolize --force --copy. The patch must be applied in order to enable translation of multi line scheme strings, and to allow custom recursive Makefile rules (which usually break due to po/Makefile.in.in). Most often the patches would not apply on systems other than mine, because they didn’t cover all stock intltool versions or would still fail for matching versions because of conflicts with patches applied to intltool during distribution packaging. The latest annoyance we ran into were m4 macro incompatibilities that for a variety of reasons were once more an issue not easily worked around.
Beast SVN now simply contains the copied and patched intltool files (0.35.0) so other developers are finally able again to build Beast from SVN without any autogen.sh trouble and pass all of make check (which also checks whether scheme strings got properly merged into .po files). After all, it’s not that many files anyway: acintltool.m4 intltool-extract.in intltool-merge.in intltool-update.in po/Makefile.intltool