git-commit-vandalism/INSTALL
Linus Torvalds c538d2d34a Add some installation notes in INSTALL
Jens was the second person who hadn't heard of the "merge" program, and
didn't have it installed.  So document as many dependency and install
issues as I can think of.
2005-06-17 11:30:04 -07:00

65 lines
2.7 KiB
Plaintext

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.