--- /dev/null
+
+ Git installation
+
+Normally you can just do "make" followed by "make install", and that
+will install the git programs in your own ~/bin/ directory. If you want
+to do a global install, you can do
+
+ make prefix=/usr install
+
+(or prefix=/usr/local, of course). Some day somebody may send me a RPM
+spec file or something, and you can do "make rpm" or whatever.
+
+Issues of note:
+
+ - git normally installs a helper script wrapper called "git", which
+ conflicts with a similarly named "GNU interactive tools" program.
+
+ Tough. Either don't use the wrapper script, or delete the old GNU
+ interactive tools. None of the core git stuff needs the wrapper,
+ it's just a convenient shorthand and while it is documented in some
+ places, you can always replace "git commit" with "git-commit-script"
+ instead.
+
+ But let's face it, most of us don't have GNU interactive tools, and
+ even if we had it, we wouldn't know what it does. I don't think it
+ has been actively developed since 1997, and people have moved over to
+ graphical file managers.
+
+ - Git is reasonably self-sufficient, but does depend on a few external
+ programs and libraries:
+
+ - "zlib", the compression library. Git won't build without it.
+
+ - "openssl". The git-rev-list program uses bignum support from
+ openssl, and unless you specify otherwise, you'll also get the
+ SHA1 library from here.
+
+ If you don't have openssl, you can use one of the SHA1 libraries
+ that come with git (git includes the one from Mozilla, and has
+ its own PowerPC-optimized one too - see the Makefile), and you
+ can avoid the bignum support by excising git-rev-list support
+ for "--merge-order" (by hand).
+
+ - "libcurl". git-http-pull uses this. You can disable building of
+ that program if you just want to get started.
+
+ - "GNU patch" to generate patches. Of course, you don't _have_ to
+ generate patches if you don't want to, but let's face it, you'll
+ be wanting to. Or why did you get git in the first place?
+
+ Non-GNU versions of the patch program don't generally support
+ the unified patch format (which is the one git uses), so you
+ really do want to get the GNU one. Trust me, you will want to
+ do that even if it wasn't for git. There's no point in living
+ in the dark ages any more.
+
+ - "merge", the standard UNIX three-way merge program. It usually
+ comes with the "rcs" package on most Linux distributions, so if
+ you have a developer install you probably have it already, but a
+ "graphical user desktop" install might have left it out.
+
+ You'll only need the merge program if you do development using
+ git, and if you only use git to track other peoples work you'll
+ never notice the lack of it.