I cannot reproduce the problem; the same checkout (emacs-24 bzr 117169) works for me with that recipe on my host (Fedora 20 x86-64, GCC 4.9.0). See attached build transcript and config.log. Looking at your build snippet I'm suspicious of lines like this: Loading emacs-lisp/byte-run (compiled; note, source file is newer)... At this point during the bootstrap process there shouldn't be a compiled file byte-run.elc, because it hasn't been built yet. In my log I see: Loading emacs-lisp/byte-run (source)... which is what I'd expect. Perhaps you were doing a 'make -j' and ran into a parallelization problem? Or maybe you did two 'make's, one interrupted? Neither should cause this problem, but still, we need an explanation for why byte-run.elc was present when it should have been absent.