Copyright (C) 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc. See the end of the file for license conditions. Building and Installing Emacs from CVS Some of the files that are included in the Emacs tarball, such as byte-compiled Lisp files, are not stored in the CVS repository. Therefore, to build from CVS you must run "make bootstrap" instead of just "make": $ cvs update -dP $ make bootstrap Of course, if this is the first time you go through it, you'll need to do ./configure before the "make bootstrap". Normally, it is not necessary to use "make bootstrap" after every CVS update. "make" should work in 90% of the cases and be much quicker. $ make (If you want to install the Emacs binary, type "make install" instead of "make" in the last command.) Occasionally the file "lisp/loaddefs.el" (and similar automatically generated files, such as esh-groups.el, and *-loaddefs.el in some subdirectories of lisp/, e.g. mh-e/ and calendar/) will need to be updated to reflect new autoloaded functions. If you see errors (rather than warnings) about undefined lisp functions during compilation, that may be the reason. Another symptom may be an error saying that "loaddefs.el" could not be found; this is due to a change in the way loaddefs.el was handled in CVS, and should only happen once, for users that are updating old CVS trees. Finally, sometimes there can be build failures related to *loaddefs.el (e.g. "required feature `esh-groups' was not provided"). In that case, follow the instructions below. To update loaddefs.el (and similar files), do: $ cd lisp $ make autogen-clean $ make autoloads If either of the above partial procedures fails, try "make bootstrap". Very occasionally changes in the source can introduce incompatibilities with previous builds. If a bootstrap fails, as a last resort try "make maintainer-clean" before configuring and bootstrapping again. If CPU time is not an issue, the most thorough way to rebuild, and avoid any spurious problems, is always to use this method. Users of non-Posix systems (MS-Windows etc.) should run the platform-specific configuration scripts (nt/configure.bat, config.bat, etc.) before "make bootstrap" or "make"; the rest of the procedure is applicable to those systems as well. Questions, requests, and bug reports about the CVS versions of Emacs should be sent to emacs-pretest-bug@gnu.org rather than gnu.emacs.help or gnu.emacs.bug. Ideally, use M-x report-emacs-bug RET which will send it to the proper place. Note on using SSH to access the CVS repository from inside Emacs ---------------------------------------------------------------- Write access to the CVS repository requires using SSH v2. If you execute cvs commands inside Emacs, specifically if you use pcl-cvs, output from CVS may be lost due to a problem in the interface between ssh, cvs, and libc. Corrupted checkins are also known to have happened. To fix the problem, save the following script into a file, make it executable, and set CVS_RSH to the file name of the script: #!/bin/bash exec 2> >(exec cat >&2 2>/dev/null) exec ssh "$@" This may be combined with the following entry in ~/.ssh/config to simplify accessing the CVS repository: Host subversions.gnu.org Protocol 2 ForwardX11 no User YOUR_USERID This file is part of GNU Emacs. GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with GNU Emacs. If not, see .