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 all doc ;# as yourself
   9         # make prefix=/usr install install-doc ;# as root
  10
  11 (or prefix=/usr/local, of course).  Just like any program suite
  12 that uses $prefix, the built results have some paths encoded,
  13 which are derived from $prefix, so "make all; make prefix=/usr
  14 install" would not work.
  15
  16 Issues of note:
  17
  18  - git normally installs a helper script wrapper called "git", which
  19    conflicts with a similarly named "GNU interactive tools" program.
  20
  21    Tough.  Either don't use the wrapper script, or delete the old GNU
  22    interactive tools.  None of the core git stuff needs the wrapper,
  23    it's just a convenient shorthand and while it is documented in some
  24    places, you can always replace "git commit" with "git-commit"
  25    instead.
  26
  27    But let's face it, most of us don't have GNU interactive tools, and
  28    even if we had it, we wouldn't know what it does.  I don't think it
  29    has been actively developed since 1997, and people have moved over to
  30    graphical file managers.
  31
  32  - Git is reasonably self-sufficient, but does depend on a few external
  33    programs and libraries:
  34
  35         - "zlib", the compression library. Git won't build without it.
  36
  37         - "openssl".  The git-rev-list program uses bignum support from
  38           openssl, and unless you specify otherwise, you'll also get the
  39           SHA1 library from here.
  40
  41           If you don't have openssl, you can use one of the SHA1 libraries
  42           that come with git (git includes the one from Mozilla, and has
  43           its own PowerPC and ARM optimized ones too - see the Makefile).
  44
  45         - "libcurl" and "curl" executable.  git-http-fetch and
  46           git-fetch use them.  If you do not use http
  47           transfer, you are probabaly OK if you do not have
  48           them.
  49
  50         - expat library; git-http-push uses it for remote lock
  51           management over DAV.  Similar to "curl" above, this is optional.
  52
  53         - "GNU diff" to generate patches.  Of course, you don't _have_ to
  54           generate patches if you don't want to, but let's face it, you'll
  55           be wanting to. Or why did you get git in the first place?
  56
  57           Non-GNU versions of the diff/patch programs don't generally support
  58           the unified patch format (which is the one git uses), so you
  59           really do want to get the GNU one.  Trust me, you will want to
  60           do that even if it wasn't for git.  There's no point in living
  61           in the dark ages any more.
  62
  63         - "merge", the standard UNIX three-way merge program.  It usually
  64           comes with the "rcs" package on most Linux distributions, so if
  65           you have a developer install you probably have it already, but a
  66           "graphical user desktop" install might have left it out.
  67
  68           You'll only need the merge program if you do development using
  69           git, and if you only use git to track other peoples work you'll
  70           never notice the lack of it.
  71
  72         - "wish", the TCL/Tk windowing shell is used in gitk to show the
  73           history graphically
  74
  75         - "ssh" is used to push and pull over the net
  76
  77         - "perl" and POSIX-compliant shells are needed to use most of
  78           the barebone Porcelainish scripts.
  79
  80         - "python" 2.3 or more recent; if you have 2.3, you may need
  81           to build with "make WITH_OWN_SUBPROCESS_PY=YesPlease".
  82
  83  - Some platform specific issues are dealt with Makefile rules,
  84    but depending on your specific installation, you may not
  85    have all the libraries/tools needed, or you may have
  86    necessary libraries at unusual locations.  Please look at the
  87    top of the Makefile to see what can be adjusted for your needs.
  88    You can place local settings in config.mak and the Makefile
  89    will include them.  Note that config.mak is not distributed;
  90    the name is reserved for local settings.
  91
  92  - To build and install documentation suite, you need to have the
  93    asciidoc/xmlto toolchain.  Alternatively, pre-formatted
  94    documentation are available in "html" and "man" branches of the git
  95    repository itself.  For example, you could:
  96
  97         $ mkdir manual && cd manual
  98         $ git init-db
  99         $ git clone-pack git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git man html |
 100           while read a b
 101           do
 102             echo $a >.git/$b
 103           done
 104         $ cp .git/refs/heads/man .git/refs/heads/master
 105         $ git checkout
 106
 107    to checkout the pre-built man pages.  Also in this repository:
 108
 109         $ git checkout html
 110
 111    would instead give you a copy of what you see at:
 112
 113         http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/
 114