On 23/07/2026 21:19, Bruno Haible via GNU coreutils General Discussion wrote:
Hi,
Here's a proposed patch to document the dependencies of the coreutils
package. It has three purposes:
* For users who build the package from source: To give them guidance
which prerequisites they should install first.
For instance, it is not trivial to guess which package to install so
that --enable-systemd has the desired effect: Is it 'libsystemd'? Nope.
Is it 'libsystemd0'? No. It is 'libsystemd-dev'.
Or, another example: In a fresh Alpine Linux installation, why does
building coreutils fail? Because you have installed the 'gcc' package,
which is suitable for compiling strict ISO C programs, but the
'linux-headers' package is missing.
* For contributors, so that they don't make wrong assumption about
coreutils. E.g.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2026-07/msg00015.html
* For distributions, so that they don't make mistakes like the one
Paul found in Ubuntu:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2026-07/msg00125.html
Why is this a separate file instead of integrated into the texinfo
documentation? Because the formatted documentation is not present in
a git checkout, and creating the formatted documentation requires
first a successful run of 'configure', a chicken-and-egg problem.
Cool thanks.
I'm going to tweak as follows.
I'll probably tweak a bit further asd we probably
should distinguish dev and runtime packages.
I.e. we don't want to suggest that end users need to install systemd-devel etc.
One way to do that might be to not mention specific package names at all.
Oh I'll also tweak GNU GMP to libgmp as G already means GNU.
cheers,
Padraig
diff --git a/DEPENDENCIES b/DEPENDENCIES
index aeee443a4..375b08d20 100644
--- a/DEPENDENCIES
+++ b/DEPENDENCIES
@@ -1,5 +1,4 @@
-The following packages should be installed before GNU coreutils is installed
-(runtime dependencies that are also build dependencies):
+# build and runtime dependencies
* systemd libraries
* Mandatory on Linux systems that use systemd (version 254 or newer).
@@ -142,15 +141,12 @@ The following packages should be installed before GNU
coreutils is installed
- Other: https://repology.org/project/smack-utils/versions
-The following packages should be installed when GNU coreutils is installed
-(runtime dependencies, but not build dependencies):
+# runtime only dependencies
None.
-The following should be installed when GNU coreutils is built, but are not
-needed later, once it is installed (build dependencies, but not runtime
-dependencies):
+# build only dependencies
* A C runtime, compiler, linker, etc.
+ Mandatory.
diff --git a/README-install b/README-install
index bbc034951..2482fd7b8 100644
--- a/README-install
+++ b/README-install
@@ -1,4 +1,5 @@
Please see the file INSTALL for generic build and installation instructions.
+Please see the file DEPENDENCIES for coreutils specific prerequisites.
This file details coreutils and system specific build instructions.
diff --git a/README-prereq b/README-prereq
index 9ae4b12af..d8b93e36b 100644
--- a/README-prereq
+++ b/README-prereq
@@ -1,4 +1,5 @@
This gives some notes on obtaining the tools required for development.
+Also note the end user prerequisites in the DEPENDENCIES file.
These tools can be used by the 'bootstrap' and 'configure' scripts,
as well as by 'make'. They include:
