1 Copyright (C) 2002-2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
2 See the end of the file for license conditions.
5 Building and Installing Emacs from the Repository
7 Building Emacs from the source-code repository requires some tools
8 that are not needed when building from a release. You will need:
10 autoconf - at least the version specified near the start of
11 configure.ac (in the AC_PREREQ command).
12 automake - at least the version specified near the start of
13 configure.ac (in the AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE command).
14 makeinfo - not strictly necessary, but highly recommended, so that
15 you can build the manuals.
17 The `autogen.sh' script can help you figure out if you have the
20 The first time you build, there are a couple of extra steps.
21 First, generate the `configure' script and some related files:
25 (or you can just run `autoreconf -i -I m4').
27 You can then configure your build (use `./configure --help' to see
32 If you want later builds to go faster, at the expense of sometimes
33 doing the wrong thing if you update the build procedure, you can
34 invoke "./configure -C" instead.
36 Some of the files that are included in the Emacs tarball, such as
37 byte-compiled Lisp files, are not stored in the repository. Therefore, to
38 build from the repository you must run "make bootstrap" instead of
43 Normally, it is not necessary to use "make bootstrap" after every
44 update from the repository. "make" should work in 90% of the cases and be
49 (If you want to install the Emacs binary, type "make install" instead
50 of "make" in the last command.)
52 Occasionally the file "lisp/loaddefs.el" (and similar automatically
53 generated files, such as esh-groups.el, and *-loaddefs.el in some
54 subdirectories of lisp/, e.g. mh-e/ and calendar/) will need to be
55 updated to reflect new autoloaded functions. If you see errors (rather
56 than warnings) about undefined lisp functions during compilation, that
57 may be the reason. Finally, sometimes there can be build failures
58 related to *loaddefs.el (e.g. "required feature `esh-groups' was not
59 provided"). In that case, follow the instructions below.
61 To update loaddefs.el (and similar files), do:
66 If either of the above partial procedures fails, try "make bootstrap".
67 If CPU time is not an issue, the most thorough way to rebuild, and
68 avoid any spurious problems, is always to use this method.
70 Users of non-Posix systems (MS-Windows etc.) should run the
71 platform-specific configuration scripts (nt/configure.bat, config.bat,
72 etc.) before "make bootstrap" or "make"; the rest of the procedure is
73 applicable to those systems as well.
75 Because the repository version of Emacs is a work in progress, it will
76 sometimes fail to build. Please wait a day or so (and check the
77 archives of the emacs-buildstatus, emacs-devel, and bug-gnu-emacs
78 mailing lists) before reporting such problems. In most cases, the
79 problem is known about and is just waiting for someone to fix it.
80 This is especially true for Lisp compilation errors, which are almost
81 never platform-specific.
85 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
87 GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
88 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
89 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
90 (at your option) any later version.
92 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
93 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
94 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
95 GNU General Public License for more details.
97 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
98 along with GNU Emacs. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.