Fakeroot makes it possible to run commands in an environment faking root privileges. This is done by setting LD_PRELOAD to libfakeroot.so, which provides wrappers around getuid, chown, chmod, mknod, stat, and so on, thereby creating a fake root environment. po4a is optional, auto-detected dependency, needed for building non-English man pages. You can skip building them by passing MANPO=no to the build script. Passing MANPO=yes will make the script fail if po4a is not installed.