Gftp is looking for two macros AM_PATH_GLIB and AM_PATH_GTK when it wants to compile. Unfortunately, these are not available on my system (Debian testing). To find a solution to this I looked in /usr/share/aclocal and found that there existed two macros AM_PATH_GLIB_2_0 and AM_PATH_GTK_2_0 instead.

Now, replacing AM_PATH_GLIB with AM_PATH_GLIB_2_0 and and AM_PATH_GTK with AM_PATH_GTK_2_0 in configure.in in the gftp source makes it get past these problems.

I also got an error saying that support for automatic de-ANSI-fication support had been removed. I got past this by commenting out AM_C_PROTOTYPES in configure.in. With these changes gftp now compiles for me.

Hope this helps,
Anders

Source: Problem with building the GNOME gftp from GIT repository 🙁