magic smoke escaping on cygwin/win98

(cc'ing porters).

I just tried to smoke cygwin on perl-current (patch 11765), and was
unable to successfully configure anything: the configure died half way
through.

Running it by hand (as ./Configure), and accepting the defaults
everywhere (well, except for the WHOA THERE at the beginning), I see
that:

After selecting the default [Policy cygwin], I see

:not found
:not found
:not found

After selecting the default [n] for build multiplicity, I see:

./xenix: not found

After selecting the default [gcc] for the compiler, I see:

'ry.c:0: malformed option `-D DEBUGGING
Uh-oh, the C compiler 'gcc' doesn't seem to be working.
You need to find a working C compiler.
Either (purchase and) install the C compiler supplied by your OS vendor,
or for a free C compiler try http://gcc.gnu.org/
I cannot continue any further, aborting.

$ uname -a
CYGWIN_98-4.10 TEQUIZA 1.3.2(0.39/3/2) 2001-05-20 23:28 i586 unknown

Can anyone supply me with clue?