This gives some notes on obtaining the tools required for development.
I.E. the tools checked for by the bootstrap script and 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/>
- Perl       <https://www.cpan.org/>
- Pkg-config <https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/pkg-config/>
- Rsync      <https://rsync.samba.org/>
- Tar        <https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/>
- Texinfo    <https://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/grep/deps/, so if you are
going to follow these instructions, first ensure that your $PATH is
set correctly by running this command:

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

* autoconf *

  # Note Autoconf 2.62 or newer is needed to build automake-1.11.1
  git clone --depth=1 git://git.sv.gnu.org/autoconf.git
  git checkout v2.62
  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 v1.11.1
  ./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.