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

perl >= v5.6.1 (see macro GROFF_PERL in file ‘m4/groff.m4’)
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 repository sources (either a checked out working copy, or a commit 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’. The same is true for some other preprocessors like ‘chem’.

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’.