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We recommend installing the following GNU tools before attempting to build the GNU C library:
make 3.79 or newer
You need the latest version of GNU make. Modifying the GNU C
Library to work with other make programs would be so difficult that we
recommend you port GNU make instead. Really. We
recommend version GNU make version 3.79. All earlier
versions have severe bugs or lack features.
The GNU C library can only be compiled with the GNU C compiler family. As of the 2.2 release, GCC 2.95.2 or higher is required. As of this writing, GCC 2.95.3 is the compiler we advise to use.
You can use whatever compiler you like to compile programs that use GNU libc, but be aware that both GCC 2.7 and 2.8 have bugs in their floating-point support that may be triggered by the math library.
For PPC you might need some patches even on top of the last GCC version. See the FAQ.
binutils 2.10.1 or later
You must use GNU binutils (as and ld) if you want to build a shared library. Even if you don't, we recommend you use them anyway. No one has tested compilation with non-GNU binutils in a long time.
The quality of binutils releases has varied a bit recently. The bugs are in obscure features, but glibc uses quite a few of those. 2.10.1 and later releases are known to work. Versions after 2.8.1.0.23 may or may not work. Older versions definitely don't.
For PPC you might need some patches even on top of the last binutils version. See the FAQ.
texinfo 3.12f
To correctly translate and install the Texinfo documentation you need
this version of the texinfo package. Earlier versions do not
understand all the tags used in the document, and the installation
mechanism for the info files is not present or works differently.
awk 3.0, or some other POSIX awk
Awk is used in several places to generate files. The scripts should
work with any POSIX-compliant awk implementation; gawk 3.0 and
mawk 1.3 are known to work.
Perl is not required, but it is used if present to test the installation. We may decide to use it elsewhere in the future.
sed 3.02 or newer
Sed is used in several places to generate files. Most scripts work with
any version of sed. The known exception is the script
po2test.sed in the intl subdirectory which is used to
generate msgs.h for the testsuite. This script works correctly
only with GNU sed 3.02. If you like to run the testsuite, you
should definitely upgrade sed.
If you change any of the configure.in files you will also need
autoconf 2.12 or higher
and if you change any of the message translation files you will need
gettext 0.10.36 or later
You may also need these packages if you upgrade your source tree using patches, although we try to avoid this.