On a good day, basecoin can be installed like a normal Go program:
go get -u github.com/tendermint/basecoin/cmd/basecoin
In some cases, if that fails, or if another branch is required,
we use glide for dependency management.
Thus, assuming you've already run go get or otherwise cloned the repo,
the correct way to install is:
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/tendermint/basecoin
git pull origin master
make get_vendor_deps
make install
This will create the basecoin binary in $GOPATH/bin.
Note the make get_vendor_deps command will install glide and the correct version of all dependencies.
If you need another branch, make sure to run git checkout <branch> before the make commands.