lalsuite needs patches to configure to build on Debian Buster and Bullseye
As discussed in !288 (merged), Debian chose not to upgrade swig to 4.0 to use Octave >= 4.4.0 - they patched swig 3.0.12 instead (build -1.1 later superseded by -1.2 provides the patch). As a result, configure should check for 3.0.12 (which is only available for Buster, Stretch is at 3.0.10, and there are no backports yet).
To avoid recreation of all configure scripts from gnuscripts/*, configure should be directly patched (and patches should be created before rolling the tarballs).
There are multiple places where version numbers ">= 4.0.0" are used, both for Octave and Swig. I'd like to suggest to modify the "swig >= 4.0.0" check to read "swig > 3.9.9" or the like, then replace all occurrences of 3.9.9 with 3.0.11 - better ideas are welcome.