attemting to fix freebsd 2.5.32 port problems

[Edward Sanford Sutton, III]

The only use for output redirect I seem to have anymore is 2>&1, but the 
configure does many more advanced things; still, what does >& mean with no 
numbers? I thought that changing my freebsd ports makefile to 

#GNU_CONFIGURE= yes
USE_AUTOCONF_VER=259

might make a difference; That would force autoconf to be executed, which I 
thought should rebuild the configure file, and the previous line would get 
commented as it is implied by the next.
Like I say, I do not understand redirects to understand this fix, nor have I 
been able to ever learn autoconf and other building tools to know where this 
problem originates from.
You may need to manually patch this file; for some reason patch refuses to 
patch the file on my side and I have not yet found out why.

diff -ru ./configure ../../working/configure
--- ./configure Fri Jun 24 13:10:02 2005
+++ ../../working/configure     Fri Jun 24 13:08:34 2005
@@ -6553,7 +6553,7 @@
 EOF
        FLEXLEXER_PATH=`$CXX -E conftest.cc | \
          sed 's!# 1 "\(.*\)FlexLexer.h"address@hidden@\1@@!g' | grep '@@' | \
-         sed 'address@hidden@\(.*\)@@.*$!\1!g' ` >& /dev/null
+         sed 'address@hidden@\(.*\)@@.*$!\1!g' ` > /dev/null
        rm conftest.cc

         echo "$as_me:$LINENO: result: $FLEXLEXER_PATH" >&5

Is there a reason why the check in autogen.sh checks for autoconf2.50 when 
>=2.50 work? freebsd has no 2.50 that I am aware of, but 2.53, and 2.59 are 
available in ports (I wonder where 2.57 went). on freebsd they are called 
autoconf253 and autoconf259 and are stored in /usr/local/bin by default.
Line 24 of ./Documentation/pictures/GNUMakefile seems to get interpreted as if 
icotool is a command when attempting to build it with ports. I'll try to 
diagnose later, but it seems to go weird if when not manually configured 
because a manual autogen.sh seems to be all it needs.

#convert +adjoin out/lilypond-48.png out/lilypond-32.png out/lilypond-16.png 
out/lilypond-48-8.png out/lilypond-32-8.png out/lilypond-16-8.png 
out/lilypond.ico
icotool --output=out/lilypond.ico --create out/lilypond-48.png 
out/lilypond-32.png out/lilypond-16.png out/lilypond-48-8.png 
out/lilypond-32-8.png out/lilypond-16-8.png
gmake[2]: icotool: Command not found
gmake[2]: *** [out/lilypond.ico] Error 127

Am I having fun yet,
Ed Sutton
P.S. all this compile time is depriving seti  =(