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 install 9 10(or prefix=/usr/local, of course). Some day somebody may send me a RPM 11spec file or something, and you can do "make rpm" or whatever. 12 13Issues 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". git-http-pull uses this. You can disable building of 45 that program if you just want to get started. 46 47 - "GNU diff" to generate patches. Of course, you don't _have_ to 48 generate patches if you don't want to, but let's face it, you'll 49 be wanting to. Or why did you get git in the first place? 50 51 Non-GNU versions of the diff/patch programs don't generally support 52 the unified patch format (which is the one git uses), so you 53 really do want to get the GNU one. Trust me, you will want to 54 do that even if it wasn't for git. There's no point in living 55 in the dark ages any more. 56 57 - "merge", the standard UNIX three-way merge program. It usually 58 comes with the "rcs" package on most Linux distributions, so if 59 you have a developer install you probably have it already, but a 60 "graphical user desktop" install might have left it out. 61 62 You'll only need the merge program if you do development using 63 git, and if you only use git to track other peoples work you'll 64 never notice the lack of it.