This gives some notes on obtaining the tools required for development.
Also note the build prerequisites in the DEPENDENCIES file.
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.