Might be a good place and time to let people know about steem/programs/build_helpers/configure_build.py. I wrote this a couple months ago and it has been included in the steem code since v0.5.0.
Just call the script with --help to find out how to use it. I usually call it with no flags to build a full node, or with the -w flag to build a witness node.
nice . i will try to dig into it as well