The Makefile.am's in elfutils contain GNU-make specific constructs. Automake >= 1.10 issues warnings, and errs out because of -Werror in bootstrap.sh. The check is to add -Wno-portablity at the end of option list for AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE in configure.ac. The issue is fixed in upstream elfutils, according to http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=240202#c1
I have committed the fix to frysk-imports/elfutils .