Well, it seems all remaining failures in the newer log look like this
| checking for gcc... no
| checking for cc... no
| checking for cl.exe... no
| configure: error: in `/export/home/dam/mgar/pkg/automake/trunk/
work/build-isa-i386/automake-1.11/tests/vala4.dir':
| configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH
| See `config.log' for more details.
| exit_status=1
which implies that your setting of $CC doesn't seem to work as
expected.
Can you look into that again, and maybe inspect one of the log files
(such as tests/depcomp7.dir/config.log) for the reason?