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.