Since 1.8, QGIS requires bison > 2.4 at build time, but since noone cares enough our bison is still stuck at 2.3. To workaround this, add the parsers generated with a WIP bison 2.6.2 to files/, and comment out the Cmake goo to call/detect bison. Add patches from http://hub.qgis.org/issues/10762. I've used QGIS 1.8, 2.0, 2.2 and 2.4 without issues since > 2 years.