http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58500
--- Comment #9 from Renzo de Paoli depaoli.renzo@gmail.com --- (In reply to Alexandre Julliard from comment #8)
The build system can be fixed so that make install works, but note that the filesystem that hosts the WINEPREFIX requires symlink support because of the DOS devices handling. That's probably the failure you got when running from the build tree, and that's not something that can be fixed on the Wine side.
Thanks Alexandre, understood.
The Guest VM that builds Wine in this case also hosts the WINEPREFIX after "make install" and is capable of handling symlinks on its own ext4 file system.
It just didn't like not being able to create symlinks on the Host's RAMdisk during the build.