This gives some notes on obtaining the tools required for development. I.E. the tools checked for by the bootstrap script and include: - Autoconf - Automake - Bison - Gettext - Git - Gperf - Gzip - Perl - Rsync - Tar - Texinfo Note please try to install/build official packages for your system. If these are not available then one can make them available only to the coreutils build using the following instructions. Even if the official packages for your system are too old, please install them as they may be required to build the newer versions. The examples below build into $HOME/coreutils/deps/, so first ensure that your $PATH is set correctly, which can be done for the current shell like: export PATH=$HOME/coreutils/deps/bin:$PATH * autoconf * # Note Autoconf 2.62 or newer is needed to build automake-1.11 git clone --depth=1 git://git.sv.gnu.org/autoconf.git git checkout v2.62 autoreconf -vi ./configure --prefix=$HOME/coreutils/deps make install * automake * # Note help2man is required to build automake fully git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/automake.git cd automake git checkout -b branch-1.11 --track origin/branch-1.11 ./bootstrap ./configure --prefix=$HOME/coreutils/deps make install coreutils uses XZ utils (successor to LZMA) to create a compressed distribution tarball. Using this feature of Automake requires version 1.10a or newer, as well as the xz program itself. * xz * git clone git://ctrl.tukaani.org/xz.git cd xz ./autogen.sh ./configure --prefix=$HOME/coreutils/deps make install Now one can build coreutils as described in README-hacking.