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