Comment 4 for bug 44676

Further investigation shows it is an out of date (well inappropriate for the current Ubuntu) configure script. Although the configure.in is present with the source code the build system isnt recreating configure but using the existing one instead.

In passing I note that configure.in is using deprecated macros -e.g
AC_CHECK_TYPE(uint8_t, unsigned char)
rather than
AC_TYPE_UINT8_T
(See http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/autoconf/autoconf_154.html)

For Ubuntu you can get round these problems by rebuilding configure and then recreating the package.

There may be a way you can force this with apt automatically but the steps to rebuild configure manually are:
download the source and dependencies using
apt-get build-dep afbackup
apt-get source afbackup
Unpack the source and cd into the directory and delete configure (and config.cache and config.setup if present).
run autoconf

Autoconf spots the old macros and either replaces them (or uses them as is) but at least generates a better code fragment.

You can then rebuild the package. The steps are:
from the parent directory apt-get -b source afbackup (or if you prefer dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -b from within the directory)
Then install it with
dpkg -i afbackup_3.5.1pl2-3_amd64.deb

I will pass these observations upstream to the authors of afbackup as they may wish to re-publish configure or change the macros. Equally they may wish to change the way the code handles the error condition that gave the out of memory error.

Dave