INSTALLon commit Start deprecating "git-command" in favor of "git command" (36e5e70)
   1
   2                Git installation
   3
   4Normally you can just do "make" followed by "make install", and that
   5will install the git programs in your own ~/bin/ directory.  If you want
   6to 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
  12that uses $prefix, the built results have some paths encoded,
  13which are derived from $prefix, so "make all; make prefix=/usr
  14install" would not work.
  15
  16Alternatively you can use autoconf generated ./configure script to
  17set up install paths (via config.mak.autogen), so you can write instead
  18
  19        $ make configure ;# as yourself
  20        $ ./configure --prefix=/usr ;# as yourself
  21        $ make all doc ;# as yourself
  22        # make install install-doc ;# as root
  23
  24
  25Issues 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 - You can use git after building but without installing if you
  42   wanted to.  Various git commands need to find other git
  43   commands and scripts to do their work, so you would need to
  44   arrange a few environment variables to tell them that their
  45   friends will be found in your built source area instead of at
  46   their standard installation area.  Something like this works
  47   for me:
  48
  49        GIT_EXEC_PATH=`pwd`
  50        PATH=`pwd`:$PATH
  51        GITPERLLIB=`pwd`/perl/blib/lib
  52        export GIT_EXEC_PATH PATH GITPERLLIB
  53
  54 - Git is reasonably self-sufficient, but does depend on a few external
  55   programs and libraries:
  56
  57        - "zlib", the compression library. Git won't build without it.
  58
  59        - "openssl".  The git-rev-list program uses bignum support from
  60          openssl, and unless you specify otherwise, you'll also get the
  61          SHA1 library from here.
  62
  63          If you don't have openssl, you can use one of the SHA1 libraries
  64          that come with git (git includes the one from Mozilla, and has
  65          its own PowerPC and ARM optimized ones too - see the Makefile).
  66
  67        - "libcurl" and "curl" executable.  git-http-fetch and
  68          git-fetch use them.  If you do not use http
  69          transfer, you are probably OK if you do not have
  70          them.
  71
  72        - expat library; git-http-push uses it for remote lock
  73          management over DAV.  Similar to "curl" above, this is optional.
  74
  75        - "wish", the Tcl/Tk windowing shell is used in gitk to show the
  76          history graphically
  77
  78        - "ssh" is used to push and pull over the net
  79
  80        - "perl" and POSIX-compliant shells are needed to use most of
  81          the barebone Porcelainish scripts.
  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
  93   the asciidoc/xmlto toolchain.  Because not many people are
  94   inclined to install the tools, the default build target
  95   ("make all") does _not_ build them.  The documentation is
  96   written for AsciiDoc 7, but "make ASCIIDOC8=YesPlease doc"
  97   will let you format with AsciiDoc 8.
  98
  99   Alternatively, pre-formatted documentation are available in
 100   "html" and "man" branches of the git repository itself.  For
 101   example, you could:
 102
 103        $ mkdir manual && cd manual
 104        $ git init
 105        $ git fetch-pack git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git man html |
 106          while read a b
 107          do
 108            echo $a >.git/$b
 109          done
 110        $ cp .git/refs/heads/man .git/refs/heads/master
 111        $ git checkout
 112
 113   to checkout the pre-built man pages.  Also in this repository:
 114
 115        $ git checkout html
 116
 117   would instead give you a copy of what you see at:
 118
 119        http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/