Gosh, I'm sorry, but I'm confused by your reply. Let me try to be more thorough in explaining what I'm doing; maybe that will be helpful, maybe I've been doing it wrong.

Originally (like, a year ago) I only downloaded the one C source file. And I did it simply by clicking on the hyperlink in that main doc page (I guess I must have then clicked on the "Download" button there). Then I typed the gcc command just like it says on the doc. Last year that worked.

When I tried the same thing recently of course it doesn't work, because I don't have the VERSION.h file.

I eventually figured out what had changed. So I did a fossil clone operation and ran make to do the build. And that worked.

So I was just suggesting that the doc page should be changed: get rid of the explicit gcc command examples, and the verbiage about being "contained within a single C-code file," and mention that one should run make. I guess you could also explicitly say that one needs a full tarball, not just the one file, but that might be obvious.