Automake unable to detect vendor on RedHat EL5

After chasing down some build problems with subversion 1.6.9 on EL5 I was noticing that it was detecting the system as x86_65-unknown-linux-gnu. Worried that it would cause me later problems I started digging through the configure script. It lead me to the build/config.guess script.
After spending too long searching the net and trying to resolve the issue, I just did this:

subversion-1.6.9>cp /usr/lib/rpm/config.guess ./build/config.guess

Basically overriding the one that came with the distro with redhat's hack.