You need to have the Jam/MR build utility installed on your system. (If you don't want to install/use Jam, then you are going to need to write a number of makefiles in whatever build system you prefer ...) The Jambase I am using is included in the Argyll archive, and it is recommended that you use this, or at least do a diff with your current Jambase, and make appropriate changes. A typical problem with not using a properly configured Jambase, is that the maths library isn't linked in on some UNIX systems. Jam/MR is available from <http://www.perforce.com/jam/jam.html> You'll want to bootstrap it up using its Makefile, and then use it with the Jambase provided in argyll, perhaps using the -f flag, creating an alias of jam that invokes jam using the -f flag, or modify the makeall scripts in Argyll to invoke Jam with the -f flag. (The Jam I'm using has been modified to look for a Jambase specified by a JAMBASE environment variable).
After unzipping the argyll.zip file, you will have to cd to the tiff sub-directory, and unzip the tiff.zip archive. If you are running on a Linux/OSX/Unix-like system, you should probably also run the configuration script (i.e. sh configure). There is no need to complete the configuration if you don't want to - ^C out of it when it asks you where you want to install things. cd back to the Argyll root directory, and if you are on a Windows NT system, run makeall.bat, and if you are on a Linux/OSX/Unix-like system, run makeall.ksh (i.e. sh makeall.ksh).
You will have to watch the compile process to pick up any build failures in each sub-directory (The Jamfiles are setup for development in a particular directory, rather than for building the whole system in one hit.)
If you are running on Mac OSX, then even though OSX comes with a version of Jam/MR in the development system, you will need to download, build and install a normal version of Jam/MR Version 2.4 or later from perforce, to be able to build Argyll. This is due to Apple changing their version of Jam sufficiently to make it incompatible with normal Jamfiles :-(. The current release was built using OSX 10.3, although there is no particular reason it shouldn't compile on earlier OSX versions).
On OSX what I did was to name the "normal" Jam ajam, and then setup
a jam shell script to invoke it something like this: "ajam
-f$~wherever/argyll/Jambase
$*", and to make sure that my script is ahead of Apples jam in my
$PATH.