two things to note: 1.) notice the make distclean. i don't really exactly know what this does, but i think it "cleans" (yeah, who would have though) out the un-needed things that ./configure and make leave behind that would interfere with your new compile. 2.) the line that is "cvs -z3 update". these are snippets from a small showeq update script i use, hopefully they will help you :) 3.) the "head -n10 CHANGES" will show you the top of the changes file, so you can see if anything really has changed.
of course, when you update from cvs if no files are updated, its a pretty sure sign you don't need to re-compile.
Code:
make distclean
cvs -d:pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot/seq login
cvs -z3 update
cvs -d :pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot/seq logout
head -n 10 CHANGES
make -f Makefile.dist && ./configure && make -j3 && make install