This gives some notes on obtaining the tools required for development.
I.E. the tools checked for by the bootstrap script and include:

- Autoconf  <http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/>
- Automake  <http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/>
- Bison     <http://www.gnu.org/software/bison/>
- Gettext   <http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/>
- Git       <http://git.or.cz/>
- Gperf     <http://www.gnu.org/software/gperf/>
- Gzip      <http://www.gnu.org/software/gzip/>
- Perl      <http://www.cpan.org/>
- Rsync     <http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/>
- Tar       <http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/>
- Texinfo   <http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/>

Note please try to install/build official packages for your system.
If these programs are not available use the following instructions
to build them and install the results into a directory that you will
then use when building this package.

Even if the official version of a package for your system is too old,
please install it, as it may be required to build the newer versions.
The examples below install into $HOME/coreutils/deps/, so if you are
going to follow these instructions, first ensure that your $PATH is
set correctly by running this command:

  prefix=$HOME/coreutils/deps
  export PATH=$prefix/bin:$PATH

* autoconf *

  # Note Autoconf 2.62 or newer is needed to build automake-1.11.2
  # but we specify 2.64 here as that's what coreutils requires.
  # Please use the latest stable release version as indicated by git tags.
  git clone --depth=1 git://git.sv.gnu.org/autoconf.git
  cd autoconf
  git checkout v2.64
  autoreconf -vi
  ./configure --prefix=$prefix
  make install

* automake *

  # Note help2man is required to build automake fully
  git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/automake.git
  cd automake
  git checkout v1.11.2
  ./bootstrap
  ./configure --prefix=$prefix
  make install

This package 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=$prefix
  make install

Now you can build this package as described in README-hacking.