The problem seems to be the presence of  -L\(libdir\) on the libtool
command lines. See makev-guile-2.0.11 for output of make V=1

But, I get the same problem when building glib-2.4, so it is unlikely
that it's a guile problem, more likely something weird about my system
(it's an old ubuntu distribution, which I can't upgrade because I
can't get a net connection beefy enough to download the gigabytes of
binaries that Linux distributuions now involve).

Nevertheless, if you or anyone else on this list have/has any idea
what it could be, I'd be grateful. I want to get guile running again.

Ian