trouble building octave-forge: build system issues?

[Alex Lancaster]

I'm the maintainer of octave-forge and, I've been beating my head
against the wall trying to build octave-forge against the new octave
3.2.2 in rawhide.  It successfully completes the %build section, but
at fails (different times) during the %install with errors like this:

+ make install TMPDIR=/var/tmp
+ DESTDIR=/builddir/build/BUILDROOT/octave-forge-20090607-8.fc12.x86_64
+ DISTPKG=redhat
mkdir (/var/tmp/oct-OxbPId)
untar (/var/tmp/quaternion-1.0.0.tar.gz, /var/tmp/oct-OxbPId)
panic: Illegal instruction -- stopping myself...
/bin/sh: line 41: 28982 Illegal instruction     octave -H -q
+ --no-site-file --eval
+ "warning('off','all');pkg('prefix','$octprefix','$archprefix');pkg('global_list',fullfile('$shareprefix','octave_packages'));pkg('local_list',fullfile('$shareprefix','octave_packages'));pkg('install','-nodeps','-nodeps','-verbose','/var/tmp/quaternion-1.0.0.tar.gz');"
error: can't perform indexing operations for cs-list type
error: evaluating argument list element number 1

task:
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=1631652
full build log:
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/getfile?taskID=1631652&name=build.log

The way the %install works is that it is installing different tarballs
in sequence and I get similar errors but for different tarballs in
each build run.

I've reported this upstream, and they seem to think that the error
potentially in the build system because the errors aren't reproducible
and it least one user has successfully built the SRPM package
currently in rawhide on an F-11 machine:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=510841#c18

I'm tracking the progress of this here:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=510841

Any ideas on how to proceed from here would be gratefully appreciated.
Note that I don't have access to a rawhide machine myself and I don't
have the resources to run a mock installation either, so if somebody
else could attempt to build the package on a true rawhide machine
outside the koji build system, that would be great.

I'm especially keen to get this done ASAP as it is currently causing
broken deps in rawhide.

Regards,
Alex