Detailed below are concrete examples for
getting the prerequisites for particular systems.

- linux - fedora

  This shows the steps for getting the required tools to build coreutils 7.0
  on a Fedora 8 system. We try to use official packages where possible.
  The 3 methods described for making these required packages available, should
  help clarify build requirements on any linux system at least.

  1. Make sure offical distro git package is installed
    # yum install git

  2. The distro autoconf is too old, but there is a newer one available
  so we rebuild that and make it available to the full system:
    # yum install emacs #autoconf build requires emacs (20MB)
    # rpmbuild --rebuild http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/development/source/SRPMS/autoconf-2.63-1.fc10.src.rpm
    # rpm -Uvh /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/noarch/autoconf-2.63-1.fc8.noarch.rpm
  Note Autoconf 2.61a-341 or newer is needed to build automake-1.10b in step 3.
  Apply the same method to install the lzma package.
  [FIXME: mention xz when it's packaged]

  3. The latest stable automake (1.10.1) was not new enough, so we download
  and build automake-1.10b or newer from its repository and make it available
  just to coreutils:
    # yum install help2man #required to build automake fully
    $ git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/automake.git
    $ cd automake
    $ git checkout -b next --track origin/next
    $ ./bootstrap
    $ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/coreutils/deps
    $ make install

  Now we can build coreutils as described in README-hacking
  as long as $PATH starts with $HOME/coreutils/deps