If you are building in a tree separate from the source tree, the vendors version of make does not work properly with regards to VPATH. It also has problems with standard inference rules in 5.2 (not tested yet in 5.3) so one needs to use GNU's make.
Under 5.2, there is a bug in the optional System V -lsocket
library in which the routine gethostbyname() is broken. The
system supplied version in -lc appears to work though so one may
simply specify --with-netlib option to configure.
In 5.3, gethostbyname() is no longer present in -lsocket and
is no longer an issue.