when hacking at ZBar, PLEASE send patches against the latest Mercurial! if you haven't already, grab the ZBar Mercurial repository by running: hg clone http://zbar.hg.sourceforge.net:8000/hgroot/zbar cd zbar autoreconf --install this will generate configure and all that other foo you usually get with a release. you will need to have recent versions of some basic "developer tools" installed in order for this to work, particularly GNU autotools. these versions of autotools are known to work (newer versions should also be fine): GNU autoconf 2.61 GNU automake 1.10.1 GNU libtool 2.2.6 when you're done hacking and want to make your patch, run: hg diff --git > hacked.patch and go post this file in the patches section off the project page: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=189236&atid=928517 finally, some interesting reading if you want to increase your chances of patch acceptance: http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch19s02.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html