I have only been discussing those tools you mentioned at the start, i.e. autoconf, m4 and bison. I see no reason to suspect that they are necessary for a source dist because that paragraph through time has come to stand in build-from-source-dist context as opposed to its original build-from-cvs context. I haven't checked, though, but I'd regard it a bug if they have.
/ Martin Stjernholm, Roxen IS
Previous text:
2003-11-05 13:24: Subject: README
That is the only list of requirements that was ever written that I know of. I suspect that some items, such as C-compiler and GMP library is still needed to compile a dist. I suspect that some items, such as autoconf and bison is not. I see absolutely no reason why "you need these 13 things to build from scratch" should imply either "you need these 13 things to build from dist" or "you don't need any of these 13 things to build from dist".
/ Martin Nilsson (saturator)