Hi,
just a short write up on my experience to compile TeXmacs from source on Debian Buster. I was on ARM, so I couldn't use prebuilt .debs or statically compiled binaries.
My first problem: guile 1.8 is not in Debian anymore and the version that that is mirrored for Texmacs here [1] did not produce debs since a unit test failed. Guile works fine tough, but I had to install it with make install directly.
Next problem: Freetype does not support freetype-conf on Debian Buster anymore, so I could use the TeXmacs configure script. So, I went for cmake.
But cmake failed as well, since GCC 8.3 complains very much about deprecated use of language elements and invalid (int *) to (size_t *) conversions. I had to manually insert "-fpermissive" into CMakeLists.txt which is far from optimal.
Hope this helps other people struggling with TeXmacs on ARM.
Yours,
Ingolf Schäfer