The NEWS mentioned that the service is disabled by default and that if you want to enable it you can, but things will still work ( but slowly ) without it. That's fine, but the configure script then should not be trying to start it, and be surprised when it won't start ( since it's disabled ), and fail to configure as a result.
Please change the configure script to either not try to start the service when it knows that it is disabled, or to ignore the failure.
