If you want to hack on the GLib project, you'll need to have the following packages installed: - GNU autoconf 2.62 - GNU automake 1.11 - GNU libtool 2.2 - GNU gettext 0.10.40 - pkg-config 0.16 - gtk-doc - libffi 3.0.0 These should be available by ftp from ftp.gnu.org or any of the fine GNU mirrors. Beta software can be found at alpha.gnu.org. To compile a GIT version of glib on your system, you will need to take several steps to setup the tree for compilation. You can do all these steps at once by running: checkout/glib# ./autogen.sh Basically this does the following for you: checkout/glib# aclocal; automake; autoconf The above commands create the "configure" script. Now you can run the configure script in checkout/glib to create all the Makefiles. Before running autogen.sh or configure, make sure you have libtool in your path. Note that autogen.sh runs configure for you. If you wish to pass options like --prefix=/usr to configure you can give those options to autogen.sh and they will be passed on to configure. For information about submitting patches see the README.commits file. For information about major design decisions, see the README.rationale file.