This gives some notes on obtaining the tools required for development.
I.E. the tools checked for by the bootstrap script and include:

- Autoconf  <http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/>
- Automake  <http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/>
- Bison     <http://www.gnu.org/software/bison/>
- Gettext   <http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/>
- Git       <http://git.or.cz/>
- Gperf     <http://www.gnu.org/software/gperf/>
- Gzip      <http://www.gnu.org/software/gzip/>
- Perl      <http://www.cpan.org/>
- Rsync     <http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/>
- Tar       <http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/>
- Texinfo   <http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/>

Note please try to install/build official packages for your system.
If these are not available then one can make them available only to
the coreutils build using the following instructions.  Even if the
official packages for your system are too old, please install them
as they may be required to build the newer versions.  The examples
below build into $HOME/coreutils/deps/, so first ensure that your
$PATH is set correctly, which can be done for the current shell like:

  export PATH=$HOME/coreutils/deps/bin:$PATH

* autoconf *

  # Note Autoconf 2.62 or newer is needed to build automake-1.11
  git clone --depth=1 git://git.sv.gnu.org/autoconf.git
  git checkout v2.62
  autoreconf -vi
  ./configure --prefix=$HOME/coreutils/deps
  make install

* automake *

  # Note help2man is required to build automake fully
  git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/automake.git
  cd automake
  git checkout -b branch-1.11 --track origin/branch-1.11
  ./bootstrap
  ./configure --prefix=$HOME/coreutils/deps
  make install

coreutils 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=$HOME/coreutils/deps
  make install

Now one can build coreutils as described in README-hacking.