To build and install from the source tarball on Unix like systems:
$ gunzip -c avrdude-5.8cvs.tar.gz | tar xf -
$ cd avrdude-5.8cvs
$ ./configure
$ make
$ su root -c 'make install'
The default location of the install is into /usr/local so you
will need to be sure that /usr/local/bin is in your PATH
environment variable.
If you do not have root access to your system, you can do the the following instead:
$ gunzip -c avrdude-5.8cvs.tar.gz | tar xf -
$ cd avrdude-5.8cvs
$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/local
$ make
$ make install