path: root/INSTALL

GNU Emacs Installation Guide
Copyright (c) 1988 Free software Foundation, Inc.

   Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies
   of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the
   copyright notice and permission notice are preserved,
   and that the distributor grants the recipient permission
   for further redistribution as permitted by this notice.

   Permission is granted to distribute modified versions
   of this document, or of portions of it,
   under the above conditions, provided also that they
   carry prominent notices stating who last changed them,
   and that any new or changed statements about the activities
   of the Free Software Foundation are approved by the Foundation.


PREPARATION

0) Make sure your system has enough swapping space allocated
 to handle a program whose pure code is 400k bytes or
 and whose data area is at least 150k and can reach 600k
 bytes or much more.  If the swapping space is insufficient, you
 will get an error in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump,
 found in $BUILD/src/ymakefile, or possibly when running the
 final dumped Emacs.
 
1) Choose a place in the file structure for the main directory
 of Emacs code to reside.  This will ultimately have
 subdirectories named src, lisp, etc, etc.  Call this name
 $EMACS.  Let $BUILD stand for the name the directory has now.

2) Copy $BUILD/src/config.h-dist to $BUILD/src/config.h,
 and edit it to set the right options for your system.  The file
 $BUILD/etc/MACHINES may help you decide what to put there.
 If you need to override any of the definitions in the s- and m-
 files for your system and machine, do so by editing config.h,
 not by changing the s- and m- files.  Occasionally you may
 need to redefine parameters used in etc/movemail.c.

3) Declare the place in the file system where Emacs will
 be once installed.  This is done in the file `src/paths.h'.
 But you don't have to change it yourself.  `build-install' and `make'
 edit `src/paths.h' automatically.

 If you are using the shell-script `build-install'
 edit the assignment that sets the variable `EMACS'.
 If you are using `make' in the main Emacs directory to do
 the installation, edit the definition of `LIBDIR' in `Makefile'
 in that directory.

 If you are doing the building by hand (not using `build-install' or
 `make') then you yourself must copy $BUILD/src/paths.h-dist to
 paths.h, and edit it to contain the correct directory names:
 $EMACS/lisp for the directory for Lisp libraries, and $EMACS/etc for
 the directory for executables and text files.

 Emacs will use these names once it has been built.
 During building, Emacs searches the directory ../lisp for
 Lisp files before the directories specified in paths.h, and
 executable files are found in ../etc.  So the main Emacs
 directory $BUILD can be anywhere while Emacs is built, but
 must be renamed to $EMACS afterwards in order for Emacs to
 work properly.

4) Look at $BUILD/lisp/paths.el; if some of those values
 are not right for your system, create a file
 $BUILD/lisp/site-init.el containing Lisp code to override them.
 You would use the Lisp function `setq'.  For example,

     (setq news-inews-program "/usr/bin/inews")

 is how you would override the default value of the
 variable news-inews-program (which is "/usr/local/inews").

5) Put into $BUILD/lisp/site-init.el any Lisp code
 you want loaded into Emacs before it is dumped out.

 This file is nonexistent in the distribution.
 You do not need to create it, if you have nothing
 to put in it.

6) Decide what compiler switches to use.
 For example, if you would like to compile with optimization, 
 you might want to change the definition of CFLAGS in
 the file $BUILD/src/ymakefile to use C_OPTIMIZE_SWITCH
 instead of C_DEBUG_SWITCH.

 Note that many Unix compilers have bugs that affect -O; if you use
 -O, be prepared to recompile without -O if you have any trouble.

 Note that many (most?) versions of debuggers
 other than GDB do not know how to handle programs like Emacs
 that use raw or cbreak mode, change other terminal status bits,
 and use asynchronous SIGIO signals for terminal input.
 However, most debuggers may work if Emacs uses a separate terminal
 from the one being used by the debugger, or if Emacs is using
 its own X window.

 If you do have a debugger that works, it is probably best to use `-g'
 so that you are not helpless in the face of a problem.

 With GCC, you can use -O and -g together.  The easiest way to do this
 is to change C_DEBUG_SWITCH to include both -O and -g.  GCC is probably
 more reliable with -O than without, as it is tested more with -O.

 The way to specify use of GCC is to set the environment variable CC
 to `gcc' before you do `make install'

7) If you wish to compile with GCC, you may need to use -traditional
 or run fixincludes.  This is needed if your system's header files
 are incompatible with ANSI C.  If your system header files are designed
 for ANSI C, then GCC should handle them properly.  For more info, refer
 the INSTALL file of GCC.

 If your system header files are non-ANSI and you don't use -traditional
 or fixincludes to compensate, the usual effect is that the ioctl
 system call does not work.  The result is an Emacs that almost completely
 fails to work.  

8) Refer to the file $BUILD/etc/TERMS for information on
 fields you may wish to add to various termcap entries.

9) Run `make install' in the main directory of the Emacs distribution
 to finish building and installing Emacs in the standard way.
 You are done!

(On system V, you need to use `make install.sysv' instead of `make install'.
On Xenix, use `make install.xenix'.
On AIX, use `make install.aix'.
You can also try `make INSTALL=./install.sh install'
on any kind of system.)

The last step of building Emacs involves running Emacs in a special
way.  At this time, if the directories that Emacs will refer to during
use for Lisp code and executables do not already exist, Emacs will
print a warning to this effect.  If you plan to have `make' create
these directories while it installs Emacs, then do not be alarmed by
the warnings.

The shell script `build-install' is an alternative to `make install'.
It is a little less sophisticated than the makefile, but probably
easier to customize for nonstandard kinds of installation.  If you
want to install in precisely the usual fashion, we recommend using
`make' rather than `build-install'.


BUILDING GNU EMACS
`make install' and its variants start with these steps to compile Emacs.

1) Cd to $BUILD/etc and run `make'.
 This creates files named `ctags' and `etags' and `wakeup'
 and `make-docfile' and `digest-doc' and `test-distrib'.  And others.

2) Cd to $BUILD/src and Run `make'
 This refers to files in the $BUILD/lisp and $BUILD/etc subdirectories
 using names ../lisp and ../etc.

 This creates a file $BUILD/src/xemacs which is the runnable Emacs,
 assigning it a new version number by incrementing the version
 stored in $BUILD/lisp/version.el.

 It also creates a file in $BUILD/etc, whose name is
 DOC followed by the current Emacs version.
 This file contains documentation strings for all the
 functions in Emacs.  Each time you run make to make a new xemacs,
 a new DOC file with a new name is made.  You must keep
 the DOC file for an Emacs version as long as you keep using
 that Emacs version.


INSTALLATION

After compilation, `make install' and its variants continue with these steps
to install the Emacs already compiled.

0) Move files from $BUILD to $EMACS if they are not the same directory.
 The files that you need include at least the subdirectories
 lisp, etc and info.  After this, the directory in which you said
 (in paths.h) Emacs would be installed actually contains the necessary
 parts of Emacs.

1) Move the file $EMACS/xemacs to /usr/local/bin/emacs,
 or some other name in users' search paths.
 `xemacs' has an alternate name $EMACS/src/emacs-EMACSVERSION;
 you may wish to make a symbolic link
 named /usr/local/bin/emacs pointing to that alternate name,
 as an easy way of installing different versions.

 You can delete $EMACS/src/temacs.

3) Move the programs ctags, etags and emacsclient from $EMACS/etc
 to /usr/local/bin.  These programs are run by users as shell commands.

 The program $EMACS/etc/wakeup is invoked by Emacs when appropriate.

 The programs $EMACS/etc/make-docfile and $EMACS/etc/test-distrib
 are not used any more; they were used in building Emacs.

 $EMACS/etc/digest-doc can be used to convert DOC into a
 file for users to read.  There is no important reason to move it.

4) The files in $EMACS/src subdirectory, except for xemacs,
 are not used by Emacs once it is built.


See the file PROBLEMS in this directory for a list of various
problems sometimes encountered, and what to do about them.