Development shell for diffutils does not appear to work - what am I doing wrong?

[Daniel Littlewood <danielittlewood@gmail.com>]

Hi guix help,

I want to try out making a simple change to the program `diff`, which
is part of GNU diffutils:
https://packages.guix.gnu.org/packages/diffutils/3.8/
I'd like to set up a dev environment, patch diff.c, rebuild it and try
out the new binary. Maybe install it globally later, but I'm not there
yet.
I cloned the diffutils repo from
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/diffutils.git, and in that directory
ran
`guix shell git vim nnn -D diffutils` (but I think it's just the -D
diffutils I'm having trouble with). I believe that the
-D/--development argument should produce a shell within which I can
build `diff`.
The README says that the first step is to run `./bootstrap`, but that
fails because of several missing packages. I don't have the full list
right now, but I think autoconf was one, and texi2pdf was another.

The packaging for diffutils clearly works (since I can install it), so
I wonder if it does something different from what I'm attempting? I
couldn't find the scheme file that defines diffutils, but I'm not sure
I'd be able to read it anyway (I'm really trying out guix for the
first time).

Thanks for reading, please let me know if I can provide more info.
Dan