INSTALL

   1
   2                 Git installation
   3
   4 Normally you can just do "make" followed by "make install", and that
   5 will install the git programs in your own ~/bin/ directory.  If you want
   6 to do a global install, you can do
   7
   8         make prefix=/usr install
   9
  10 (or prefix=/usr/local, of course).  Some day somebody may send me a RPM
  11 spec file or something, and you can do "make rpm" or whatever.
  12
  13 Issues of note:
  14
  15  - git normally installs a helper script wrapper called "git", which
  16    conflicts with a similarly named "GNU interactive tools" program.
  17
  18    Tough.  Either don't use the wrapper script, or delete the old GNU
  19    interactive tools.  None of the core git stuff needs the wrapper,
  20    it's just a convenient shorthand and while it is documented in some
  21    places, you can always replace "git commit" with "git-commit-script"
  22    instead.
  23
  24    But let's face it, most of us don't have GNU interactive tools, and
  25    even if we had it, we wouldn't know what it does.  I don't think it
  26    has been actively developed since 1997, and people have moved over to
  27    graphical file managers.
  28
  29  - Git is reasonably self-sufficient, but does depend on a few external
  30    programs and libraries:
  31
  32         - "zlib", the compression library. Git won't build without it.
  33
  34         - "openssl".  The git-rev-list program uses bignum support from
  35           openssl, and unless you specify otherwise, you'll also get the
  36           SHA1 library from here.
  37
  38           If you don't have openssl, you can use one of the SHA1 libraries
  39           that come with git (git includes the one from Mozilla, and has
  40           its own PowerPC-optimized one too - see the Makefile), and you
  41           can avoid the bignum support by excising git-rev-list support
  42           for "--merge-order" (by hand).
  43
  44         - "libcurl" and "curl" executable.  git-http-pull and
  45           git-fetch-script use them.  If you do not use http
  46           transfer, you are probabaly OK if you do not have
  47           them.
  48
  49         - "GNU diff" to generate patches.  Of course, you don't _have_ to
  50           generate patches if you don't want to, but let's face it, you'll
  51           be wanting to. Or why did you get git in the first place?
  52
  53           Non-GNU versions of the diff/patch programs don't generally support
  54           the unified patch format (which is the one git uses), so you
  55           really do want to get the GNU one.  Trust me, you will want to
  56           do that even if it wasn't for git.  There's no point in living
  57           in the dark ages any more.
  58
  59         - "merge", the standard UNIX three-way merge program.  It usually
  60           comes with the "rcs" package on most Linux distributions, so if
  61           you have a developer install you probably have it already, but a
  62           "graphical user desktop" install might have left it out.
  63
  64           You'll only need the merge program if you do development using
  65           git, and if you only use git to track other peoples work you'll
  66           never notice the lack of it.