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 Alternatively you can use autoconf generated ./configure script to
  17 set up install paths (via config.mak.autogen), so you can write instead
  18
  19         $ autoconf ;# as yourself if ./configure doesn't exist yet
  20         $ ./configure --prefix=/usr ;# as yourself
  21         $ make all doc ;# as yourself
  22         # make install install-doc ;# as root
  23
  24
  25 Issues of note:
  26
  27  - git normally installs a helper script wrapper called "git", which
  28    conflicts with a similarly named "GNU interactive tools" program.
  29
  30    Tough.  Either don't use the wrapper script, or delete the old GNU
  31    interactive tools.  None of the core git stuff needs the wrapper,
  32    it's just a convenient shorthand and while it is documented in some
  33    places, you can always replace "git commit" with "git-commit"
  34    instead.
  35
  36    But let's face it, most of us don't have GNU interactive tools, and
  37    even if we had it, we wouldn't know what it does.  I don't think it
  38    has been actively developed since 1997, and people have moved over to
  39    graphical file managers.
  40
  41  - Git is reasonably self-sufficient, but does depend on a few external
  42    programs and libraries:
  43
  44         - "zlib", the compression library. Git won't build without it.
  45
  46         - "openssl".  The git-rev-list program uses bignum support from
  47           openssl, and unless you specify otherwise, you'll also get the
  48           SHA1 library from here.
  49
  50           If you don't have openssl, you can use one of the SHA1 libraries
  51           that come with git (git includes the one from Mozilla, and has
  52           its own PowerPC and ARM optimized ones too - see the Makefile).
  53
  54         - "libcurl" and "curl" executable.  git-http-fetch and
  55           git-fetch use them.  If you do not use http
  56           transfer, you are probably OK if you do not have
  57           them.
  58
  59         - expat library; git-http-push uses it for remote lock
  60           management over DAV.  Similar to "curl" above, this is optional.
  61
  62         - "GNU diff" to generate patches.  Of course, you don't _have_ to
  63           generate patches if you don't want to, but let's face it, you'll
  64           be wanting to. Or why did you get git in the first place?
  65
  66           Non-GNU versions of the diff/patch programs don't generally support
  67           the unified patch format (which is the one git uses), so you
  68           really do want to get the GNU one.  Trust me, you will want to
  69           do that even if it wasn't for git.  There's no point in living
  70           in the dark ages any more.
  71
  72         - "merge", the standard UNIX three-way merge program.  It usually
  73           comes with the "rcs" package on most Linux distributions, so if
  74           you have a developer install you probably have it already, but a
  75           "graphical user desktop" install might have left it out.
  76
  77           You'll only need the merge program if you do development using
  78           git, and if you only use git to track other peoples work you'll
  79           never notice the lack of it.
  80
  81         - "wish", the Tcl/Tk windowing shell is used in gitk to show the
  82           history graphically
  83
  84         - "ssh" is used to push and pull over the net
  85
  86         - "perl" and POSIX-compliant shells are needed to use most of
  87           the barebone Porcelainish scripts.
  88
  89         - "python" 2.3 or more recent; if you have 2.3, you may need
  90           to build with "make WITH_OWN_SUBPROCESS_PY=YesPlease".
  91
  92  - Some platform specific issues are dealt with Makefile rules,
  93    but depending on your specific installation, you may not
  94    have all the libraries/tools needed, or you may have
  95    necessary libraries at unusual locations.  Please look at the
  96    top of the Makefile to see what can be adjusted for your needs.
  97    You can place local settings in config.mak and the Makefile
  98    will include them.  Note that config.mak is not distributed;
  99    the name is reserved for local settings.
 100
 101  - To build and install documentation suite, you need to have the
 102    asciidoc/xmlto toolchain.  Alternatively, pre-formatted
 103    documentation are available in "html" and "man" branches of the git
 104    repository itself.  For example, you could:
 105
 106         $ mkdir manual && cd manual
 107         $ git init-db
 108         $ git fetch-pack git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git man html |
 109           while read a b
 110           do
 111             echo $a >.git/$b
 112           done
 113         $ cp .git/refs/heads/man .git/refs/heads/master
 114         $ git checkout
 115
 116    to checkout the pre-built man pages.  Also in this repository:
 117
 118         $ git checkout html
 119
 120    would instead give you a copy of what you see at:
 121
 122         http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/
 123