Comment 3 for bug 898327

I conclude that while it does not work with natty and earlier it will work out of the box with oneric and later :)
I am going to try that soon.

However, I assume it will thus be non-trivial to install builds of the latest version on older Ubuntu releases :(

Regarding bake:
I am on the same page with you regarding the problems with autotools/make. But when I see something like this, I wonder if you know about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinventing_the_wheel
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_build_automation_software

I do not say bake is pointless, though -- if I were that kind of person, I wouldn't use Simple Scan instead of xsane, would I? However I think it needs to explicitly declare how and why it is different from the original make and why you cannot make the original make work that way.