A few more notes or comments. Initially I downloaded a tar ball from the git repository. That one is the one that appeared to work. I just did a git clone and that one times out instead of thinking it is working. I noticed that the transfer size is different.
Also was reminded that I had to hand edit the dfu_version.h because the mac osx echo does not allow echo -e so the generation of that file fails.
If I set the transfer size to a smaller value the git version works like the regular, but it doing so I have trashed by firmware as it will no longer start.