Using a nightlies is definately the way to go — lots of deps are not required then. It’s also mostly as up-to-date as cvs. There isn’t much in cvs that isn’t in the last nightly, so if you are using that, you are pretty current.
Remember that to run nightlies, you need sqlite-2.8.x and libid3tag, as well as development headers.
If you are using a distro that has those two packages built in (and I can’t think of one that shouldn’t), then the nightly should be as simple as untar + make.
— Ron
Note that make install won’t copy a config file into /etc, so you need to start with the sample config in contrib/mt-daapd.conf and use that as a starting point.