path: root/README-prereq

This gives some notes on obtaining the tools required for development. These tools can be used by the 'bootstrap' and 'configure' scripts, as well as by 'make'. They include: - Autoconf <https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/> - Automake <https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/> - Bison <https://www.gnu.org/software/bison/> - Gettext <https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/> - Git <https://git-scm.com/> - Gperf <https://www.gnu.org/software/gperf/> - Gzip <https://www.gnu.org/software/gzip/> - Help2man <https://www.gnu.org/software/help2man/> - M4 <https://www.gnu.org/software/m4/> - Make <https://www.gnu.org/software/make/> - Perl <https://www.cpan.org/> - Tar <https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/> - Texinfo <https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/> - Wget <https://www.gnu.org/software/wget/> - XZ Utils <https://tukaani.org/xz/> It is generally better to use official packages for your system. If a package is not officially available you can build it from source and install it into a directory that you can then use to build this package. If some packages are available but are too old, install the too-old versions first as they may be needed to build newer versions. Here is an example of how to build a program from source. This example is for Autoconf; a similar approach should work for the other developer prerequisites. This example assumes Autoconf 2.71; it should be OK to use a later version of Autoconf, if available. prefix=$HOME/prefix # (or wherever else you choose) export PATH=$prefix/bin:$PATH wget https://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.71.tar.gz gzip -d <autoconf-2.71.tar.gz | tar xf - cd autoconf-2.71 ./configure --prefix=$prefix make install Once the prerequisites are installed, you can build this package as described in README-hacking.