If you install from CVS, call

./autogen.sh
make
make install

To make a distribution tarball do

./autogen.sh
make -C docs
make distcheck

See the INSTALL and TROUBLESHOOTING file for more information.

Note: If you are building the python bindings, automake-1.9 has some
minor improvements over automake-1.7 in the py-compile script used to
byte-compile the *.py files.  You may change REQUIRED_AUTOMAKE_VERSION
to 1.9 in autogen.sh if you wish.