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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 all doc ;# as yourself
# make prefix=/usr install install-doc ;# as root
(or prefix=/usr/local, of course). Just like any program suite
that uses $prefix, the built results have some paths encoded,
which are derived from $prefix, so "make all; make prefix=/usr
install" would not work.
Alternatively you can use autoconf generated ./configure script to
set up install paths (via config.mak.autogen), so you can write instead
$ make configure ;# as yourself
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr ;# as yourself
$ make all doc ;# as yourself
# make install install-doc ;# as root
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"
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.
- You can use git after building but without installing if you
wanted to. Various git commands need to find other git
commands and scripts to do their work, so you would need to
arrange a few environment variables to tell them that their
friends will be found in your built source area instead of at
their standard installation area. Something like this works
for me:
GIT_EXEC_PATH=`pwd`
PATH=`pwd`:$PATH
GITPERLLIB=`pwd`/perl/blib/lib
export GIT_EXEC_PATH PATH GITPERLLIB
- 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 and ARM optimized ones too - see the Makefile).
- "libcurl" and "curl" executable. git-http-fetch and
git-fetch use them. If you do not use http
transfer, you are probably OK if you do not have
them.
- expat library; git-http-push uses it for remote lock
management over DAV. Similar to "curl" above, this is optional.
- "GNU diff" 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 diff/patch programs 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.
- "wish", the Tcl/Tk windowing shell is used in gitk to show the
history graphically
- "ssh" is used to push and pull over the net
- "perl" and POSIX-compliant shells are needed to use most of
the barebone Porcelainish scripts.
- "python" 2.3 or more recent; if you have 2.3, you may need
to build with "make WITH_OWN_SUBPROCESS_PY=YesPlease".
- Some platform specific issues are dealt with Makefile rules,
but depending on your specific installation, you may not
have all the libraries/tools needed, or you may have
necessary libraries at unusual locations. Please look at the
top of the Makefile to see what can be adjusted for your needs.
You can place local settings in config.mak and the Makefile
will include them. Note that config.mak is not distributed;
the name is reserved for local settings.
- To build and install documentation suite, you need to have the
asciidoc/xmlto toolchain. Alternatively, pre-formatted
documentation are available in "html" and "man" branches of the git
repository itself. For example, you could:
$ mkdir manual && cd manual
$ git init-db
$ git fetch-pack git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git man html |
while read a b
do
echo $a >.git/$b
done
$ cp .git/refs/heads/man .git/refs/heads/master
$ git checkout
to checkout the pre-built man pages. Also in this repository:
$ git checkout html
would instead give you a copy of what you see at:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/