From thomas_rowe@psualum.com

There is a typo (a missing "'") in makedepend.SH that stops my attempts
to build. The attached patch fixes the problem.

The unpatched bug​:
$ sh Configure -des -Dprefix=/home/thomasro/perl -Dcc=gcc-3.4
...
echo av.c scope.c op.c doop.c doio.c dump.c hv.c mg.c reentr.c perl.c
perly.c pp.c pp_hot.c pp_ctl.c pp_sys.c regcomp.c regexec.c utf8.c gv.c
sv.c taint.c toke.c util.c deb.c run.c universal.c xsutils.c pad.c
globals.c perlio.c perlapi.c numeric.c locale.c pp_pack.c pp_sort.c
miniperlmain.c perlmain.c opmini.c | tr ' ' '\n' >.clist
make[1]​: Leaving directory `/home/kkrev/Desktop/unfixed-perl/perl-5.8.8'
*./makedepend​: 1​: Syntax error​: Unterminated quoted string
**make​: *** [depend] Error 2*

From thomas_rowe@psualum.com

--- makedepend.SH	2003-06-05 14:11:10.000000000 -0400
+++ ../../perl-5.8.8/makedepend.SH	2007-08-11 22:55:36.000000000 -0400
@@ -128,7 +128,7 @@
     *.y) filebase=`basename $file .y` ;;
     esac
     case "$file" in
-    */*) finc="-I`echo $file | sed 's#/[^/]*$##`" ;;
+    */*) finc="-I`echo $file | sed 's#/[^/]*$##'`" ;;
     *)   finc= ;;
     esac
     $echo "Finding dependencies for $filebase$_o."

From @Tux

Thanks for reporting, but this change has already been committed to the
development branch as change #30870 on 08-04-2007

@Tux - Status changed from 'new' to 'resolved'