Hello,

Though I don't use neither contribute to shepherd, nor guix, guixsd either, I got
curious, because the error message did trigger a bell, so I went on and visited the
source code and here is my few cents :)

> I am already failing in getting the shepherd configured. On a fresh git
> checkout, I do
>    autoreconf -vfi
> and obtain the following:

I think it would be better if the tree had the traditional ./autogen.sh
or ./bootstrap, especially because it would contain more then just 'autoreconf -vfi'
(see below)

> autoreconf: Entering directory `.'
> autoreconf: configure.ac: not using Gettext
> autoreconf: running: aclocal --force -I m4
> aclocal: warning: couldn't open directory 'm4': No such file or directory

Not sure why this happens, I don't see the usual 'AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([m4])'
in the shepherd configure.ac file, maybe someone else has a clue? It's a warning
though, so it might be ok anyway ...

> ...
> configure.ac:17: error: required file 'build-aux/config.rpath' not found
> configure.ac:17: error: required file './ABOUT-NLS' not found

Don't know about the later, but wrt the former, I started to get these errors soon
after I started to contribute to guile-gnome/guile-clutter, and here is what I wrote
in their respective ./autogen.sh

<---- autogen.sh starts here ---->
#!/bin/sh
# Run this to generate all the initial makefiles, etc.

# configure.ac uses the guile.m4 GUILE_FLAGS macro, among others,
# which needs build-aux/config.rpath which is not installed anymore by
# modern version of automake, and without it, this script will raise
# an error. For why it's needed, see the comments wtr in m4/guile.m4.
if [ ! -d "build-aux" ]; then
    mkdir build-aux
fi
touch build-aux/config.rpath

autoreconf -vif

echo
echo "Now run ./configure --prefix=/your/prefix."
<---- autogen.sh ends here ---->

> ...
> config.status: creating Makefile
> config.status: error: cannot find input file: `po/Makefile.in.in'
> ...

Here there are two problems:

1-	the configure.ac has a tipo

	line 86, it has '... po/Makefile.in'
	but it should be '... po/Makefile'

2-	the po subdir does not have a Makefile.in

HTH,
David