Stupid newbie question/ramble: Install?

[Jay Levitt]

Hi there...

I'm way down in the weeds after a day of trying to port a bunch of GNU 
utils, and I will probably wake up in the middle of the night and figure 
out these answers myself.  (The questions are so basic that I seriously 
considered posting these under an assumed name so that nobody will ever 
find my post again.) But, in case I don't:

I'm working on porting more GNU utilities to Stratus VOS, which supports 
POSIX-1 but in some pretty unusual ways (e.g. it's on a Pentium-4, but 
is big-endian).  I'm caught in a bit of a dependency loop where I tried 
upgrading bison, which needs m4, which (1.4.10) doesn't build properly 
at the moment (but 1.4.0 built at one point), so I started patching it 
but of course autoreconf doesn't like old m4... etc.

The root of the m4 problem seems to be fseeko, which VOS doesn't 
support.  m4 pulls that in from gnulib, but gives a very odd error:

gcc  -g -O2   -o test-closein.pm test-closein.o ../lib/libm4.a
bind: Undefined entry point: fseeko, first referenced by fseeko.

(bind is the VOS linker, which the VOS version of gcc launches behind 
the scenes.)  So that's pretty interesting.  I figured I'd try running 
fseeko's unit tests, away from m4, and see what happened.  There's no 
way I'll get gnulib-tool working on VOS yet, of course, but I can pull 
it into cygwin easily enough.  So I installed git in cygwin, cloned the 
repository to /usr/local/src/porting/gnulib-tool, went to pull down the 
fseeko module and realized

I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA HOW TO INSTALL THIS THING.

Nothing in the manual, nothing in the README, no configure script, no 
makefile target, a generic doc/INSTALL text file and a pretty odd 
one-line doc/README.  build-aux seems to be things you'd use in a 
project that *uses* gnulib-tool, not for gnulib-tool itself.  
gnulib-tool --help doesn't tell me anything.  And if I just copy 
gnulib-tool to /usr/local/bin, it'll have no idea where it's supposed to 
live, put modules, etc.

So: Am I supposed to add /usr/local/src/porting/gnulib-tool to my path?  
Am I supposed to do something else? 

Second, slightly more intelligent question:  What sort of 
interdependencies are there in running the tests?  That is, do they 
expect gnulib-tool itself or the repository to be installed?  Can I just 
copy the whole fseeko directory from cygwin over to my VOS machine and 
expect it to run there? 

Thanks in advance...

Jay Levitt