building gnuchess?

It seems surprisingly hard to build the gnuchess executable. Is there  
more documentation that I have not been able to find?

I assume that the GNU cvs repositories are not available for read- 
only access. Sime mentioned the cvs repository in an earlier e-mail,  
but I do not see an access point for it, nor do I see one mentioned  
fron http://www.gnu.org/.

I am trying to do two things. First I want to build it on Mac OS X. I  
can do a "port install gnuchess" and I get a working copy that way,  
but it seems odd that I cannot go to any of the downloadable versions  
of the sources and build it. I suppose I can capture exactly what the  
"port install" is doing and just execute that. Is that really the  
only way to go here?

The other thing I am trying to do is cross-compile the gnuchess  
executable for an ARM9 platform on an Ubuntu linux system. I have  
ported lots of other things, but have not been successful with  
gnuchess. I have tried both a cross-compiler toolchain that runs  
natively on an Ubuntu linux system and a scratchbox environment on  
that system that is set up to build ARM9 executables. I see an error  
in the scratchbox environment that I have not seen anywhere else.  
Essentially, configure complains that it is not supposed to be used  
with a cross-compiler. But scratchbox works by pretending you are not  
using a cross-compiler, so I am not sure where the error is coming from.

It seems strange to me that I can fetch and build many gnu-ish things  
and build them fine and then I have a problem with gnuchess. Am I  
just missing something obvious? Also, I am again not finding very  
much documentation. I see the FAQ everywhere, but that is minimal. Is  
there any doc between the FAQ and the source itself?

Has anyone else cross-compiled the gnuchess executable?

- ray