mk/termcap.buildlink3.mk" line 48: Malformed conditional

["Jeremy C. Reed" <reed%reedmedia.net@localhost>]

On centos 6.5 I have ncurses-devel-5.7-3.20090208.el6.x86_64 already 
installed via yum.

Building autoconf in pkgsrc needs help2man which needs msgfmt which 
needs gettext-tools:

$ time ~/pkg/bin/bmake
bmake: "../../mk/../../mk/termcap.buildlink3.mk" line 48: Malformed 
conditional (empty(TERMCAP_TYPE:M${:Utinfo})  && 
(!defined(TERMINFO_TYPE) || empty(TERMINFO_TYPE:M${:Utinfo}))  && 
(!defined(CURSES_TYPE) || empty(CURSES_TYPE:M${:Utinfo})))
bmake: Fatal errors encountered -- cannot continue

bmake: stopped in /home/jreed/pkgsrc/devel/gettext-tools

show-var shows me these are all not set.