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There are two classes of software prerequisites (or dependencies, if you will) to build the GNU philosophy package: required and optional. If you are missing a required prerequisite the configuration step will fail with an error message stating what package is needed, which is its minimal acceptable version, and will point you to where you can obtain it. On the other side, the optional prerequisites are needed to perform a task not considered critical for the overall build process of the package, thus, although the successful build can be accomplished, the resultant build may not have all possible features enabled or only is possible to realize partial, yet auto-sufficient, builds. Often, in order to reduce the set of programs the user need to have installed to complete a build, the maintainers distribute a set of files that are not source files, but the result of a pre-build procedure. In that case, as long as you don’t modify the original source files, you don’t need to worry about the software used to compile the source files, as the target object files are up-to-date.
Instead of designing this package’s build system make-files portable, the maintainers have chosen to use a portable make program, namely GNU Make.
Version 3.81 or superior is known to work correctly. Earlier versions may work, though. You can obtain it from https://gnu.org/software/make.
It is highly critical for the build procedure as the entire source tree of articles and essays is written in Texinfo language. However, the Info collections, in every available translation language, is built by the maintainers, so you can install and use it without building anything.
Version 5.0 or superior is required. You can obtain it from https://gnu.org/software/texinfo.
It is required by any localization operation, notably by localized builds. Without it you’ll only be able to build from the original sources (in English language).
You can obtain it from http://po4a.alioth.debian.org/. Currently a patch needed to process correctly GNU philosophy Texinfo source code is not present in the latest released version, but it’s already applied in PO4A VCS (Version Control System) repository. See Bugs.
It is needed for the rendering of the numerous scripts, in several different languages, contained in the essay Translations of the Term “Free Software”. Nevertheless, the scripts are distributed pre-rendered for essays in every format, except DVI and PS.
You can obtain it from https://gnu.org/software/unifont/. Make
sure you get the TTF build of it, otherwise the scripts probably won’t
be rendered properly as the result of a bug in ImageMagick program
convert. See Bugs.
It is used to render the scripts with GNU Unifont and also to convert some source figures to the appropriate format for inclusion in the essays. As with GNU Unifont, all needed figures are distributed with this package, but those needed by DVI and PS essays.
You can obtain it from http://www.imagemagick.org/. It is not clear which is the minimal acceptable version. Please, submit a bug report if a specific old version of ImageMagick doesn’t work properly. See Bug reporting.
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