Building gnulib
===============

If you wish to help the gnulib development effort with build logs for your favorite platform, you may perform these steps:

 1. Prerequisites tools

     Install the proper development tools.  To build and test all of Gnulib, you will need development tools for the programming languages C, C++, Java, and Perl, along with standard POSIX utilities such as awk, make and sh.  You will also need development tools that include Autoconf, Automake, Bison, Gettext, Git, GNU M4, Gperf, Libtool, and Texinfo.  Some of these tools are needed only by some modules.  More details can be found in Gnulib's DEPENDENCIES file.

 2. Obtain Gnulib

     See https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/ for how to get the current Gnulib sources via Git.

 3. Create gnulib directory

     On a machine with GNU development tools installed and with a gnulib git checkout, use

          gnulib-tool --create-megatestdir --with-tests --dir=...

     Note: The created directory uses ca. 512 MB on disk.

 4. Transfer gnulib directory

     Transfer this directory to a build machine (HP-UX, Cygwin, or whatever).  Often it is easier to transfer one file, and this can be achieved by running, inside the directory the following commands:

          ./configure
          make dist

     And then transferring the dummy-0.tar.gz file.

 5. Build modules

     On the build machine, run ./do-autobuild (or "nohup ./do-autobuild"). It creates a directory logs/ with a log file for each module.