I've checked in some changes to make nettle compile on systems which lack alloca, and on systems which lack inttypes.h.
For systems without alloca, some arbitrary limits have been placed on the input of a few functions, but I hope that won't be a problem in practice.
As I don't have access to any systems that have these problems, I'll appreciate if Simon and any other people that have seen the problems could try it out and see if it works.
As some shared but crucial files are not stored in the nettle corner of the cvs, the recommended way of cvs access is to check out the entire lsh tree, as per the instructions at http://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/lsh, run the top-level ./.bootstrap script (which sets up a few important symlinks and runs .bootstrap scripts in subdirectories), and then descend into the src/nettle directory for a standard ./configure && make there.
Best regards, /Niels