On current Fedora releases the ocaml modules will fail to link unless CFLAGS contains -fPIC. The autogen.sh script only updates the 'gnulib' submodule, and so the build will fail due to the missing 'common' submodule. This needs to be manually initialized at checkout. Signed-off-by: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange(a)redhat.com&gt; --- The above was required for me to build on Fedora 31, but I don't think it is entirely satisfactory. IMHO, configure ought to add -fPIC automatically if it is needed by the distro. I also expected autogen.sh to update the submodules besides just gnulib. docs/guestfs-building.pod | 3 ++- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/docs/guestfs-building.pod b/docs/guestfs-building.pod index 4bed86391..005626515 100644 --- a/docs/guestfs-building.pod +++ b/docs/guestfs-building.pod @@ -414,7 +414,8 @@ git. git clone https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs cd libguestfs - ./autogen.sh + git submodule update --init + CFLAGS=-fPIC ./autogen.sh make =head1 BUILDING FROM TARBALLS