Depending on your requirements, you may need at least some of the following tools to build groff directly from its source:

ghostscript
the psutils package
the netpbm package
texinfo 4.8
bison ≥ 1.875b or byacc

Note that texinfo and bison or byacc are required only for building from CVS sources (either a checked out working copy, or a daily snapshot). They are not required for building from a stable release tarball. Also note that the version numbers stated are the minimum supported. No version of texinfo < 4.8 works, and the original release of bison 1.875 is known not to work; you may find that bison releases < 1.875 work, but in case of difficulty, please update to a later version before posting a bug report.

For all sources, you need ghostscript for creation of either PDF or HTML output; the netpbm and psutils packages are required only for HTML output. If you don’t intend to produce output in either of these formats, then these packages are unnecessary.

Additionally, producing ‘PDF’ output directly with the ‘gropdf’ device needs a working installation of Perl.

In Linux Debian, the installation of texinfo is dangerous, for it creates a file install-info that blocks the system installation. So the created /usr/local/bin/install-info must be renamed.

The groff configure script searches for the X11 headers and libraries Xaw and Xmu. So the corresponding developer packages of your system must be installed, otherwise groff does not install gxditview and the -TX* devices. In Debian, the developer packages are libxaw7-dev and libxmu-dev.