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6.7 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-testdir --with-tests --dir=...
   

   Alternatively, pick a small set of modules and run

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

   (You can’t do this with all of Gnulib at once: gnulib-tool would run for a week and produce a directory that takes more than 100 GB, maybe even 1 TB, of disk space.)

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.