INSTALLon commit Merge branch 'hold/rpm' (68afd5f)
   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 ;# as yourself
   9        # make prefix=/usr install ;# 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
  16Issues 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-optimized one too - see the Makefile), and you
  44          can avoid the bignum support by excising git-rev-list support
  45          for "--merge-order" (by hand).
  46
  47        - "libcurl" and "curl" executable.  git-http-fetch and
  48          git-fetch use them.  If you do not use http
  49          transfer, you are probabaly OK if you do not have
  50          them.
  51
  52        - expat library; git-http-push uses it for remote lock
  53          management over DAV.  Similar to "curl" above, this is optional.
  54
  55        - "GNU diff" to generate patches.  Of course, you don't _have_ to
  56          generate patches if you don't want to, but let's face it, you'll
  57          be wanting to. Or why did you get git in the first place?
  58
  59          Non-GNU versions of the diff/patch programs don't generally support
  60          the unified patch format (which is the one git uses), so you
  61          really do want to get the GNU one.  Trust me, you will want to
  62          do that even if it wasn't for git.  There's no point in living
  63          in the dark ages any more. 
  64
  65        - "merge", the standard UNIX three-way merge program.  It usually
  66          comes with the "rcs" package on most Linux distributions, so if
  67          you have a developer install you probably have it already, but a
  68          "graphical user desktop" install might have left it out.
  69
  70          You'll only need the merge program if you do development using
  71          git, and if you only use git to track other peoples work you'll
  72          never notice the lack of it. 
  73
  74        - "wish", the TCL/Tk windowing shell is used in gitk to show the
  75          history graphically
  76
  77        - "ssh" is used to push and pull over the net