Comment 6 for bug 817290

...follow-up: it looks like Aleksandr's "git" command downloads the source to your home directory, unless you have configured bash pathnames in some unusual way. Assuming that the "git" command has created a "fontforge" directory in your home directory, I think the following commands are:
$ cd fontforge
$ ./configure
$ sudo make install
...however this resulted in a failed compile, in my case. The final lines of the compilation process were:
python.c:35:20: fatal error: Python.h: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.
make[1]: *** [python.lo] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/pietro/fontforge/fontforge'
make: *** [fontforge] Error 2