Harvest project was orphaned for a period of time and during this time some versions were forked off from the main Harvest tree. I did my best to merge all the forked trees into Harvest 1.6. Bison and flex are available at ftp.gnu.org and its mirrors. The versions between these two versions have a bug which prevents DVI files being summarized. You need xpdf to summarize pdf files.
Harvest uses pdftotext from xpdf to summarize pdf files.
Alternatively, you can use acroread to convert pdf files to Postscript and pass it to Postscript summarizer. No, https is not supported by Harvest. To gather https URLs, use Harvest-ng from Simon Wilkinson. This is not on top of my to-do list and may take some time. Harvest doesn't put hostnames into NEWS URLs.