1 Building and Installing Emacs from the Repository
3 Simply run 'make'. This should work if your files are freshly checked
4 out from the repository, and if you have the proper tools installed.
5 If it doesn't work, or if you have special build requirements, the
6 following information may be helpful.
8 Building Emacs from the source-code repository requires some tools
9 that are not needed when building from a release. You will need:
11 autoconf - at least the version specified near the start of
12 configure.ac (in the AC_PREREQ command).
13 git - at least Git 1.7.1. If your repository was created by an older
14 Git version, you may need to reclone it.
15 makeinfo - not strictly necessary, but highly recommended, so that
16 you can build the manuals. GNU Texinfo 4.13 or later should work.
18 To use the autotools, run the following shell command to generate the
19 'configure' script and some related files, and to set up your git
24 You can then configure your build as follows:
28 The 'configure' script has many options; run './configure --help' to
29 see them. For example, if you want later builds to go faster, albeit
30 sometimes doing the wrong thing if you update the build procedure, you
31 can invoke './configure -C'. After configuring, build Emacs as follows:
35 If you want to install Emacs, type 'make install' instead of 'make' in
38 Occasionally the file 'lisp/loaddefs.el' (and similar automatically
39 generated files, such as 'esh-groups.el', and '*-loaddefs.el' in some
40 subdirectories of 'lisp/', e.g., 'mh-e/' and 'calendar/') will need to be
41 updated to reflect new autoloaded functions. If you see errors (rather
42 than warnings) about undefined lisp functions during compilation, that
43 may be the reason. Finally, sometimes there can be build failures
44 related to '*loaddefs.el' (e.g., "required feature ‘esh-groups’ was not
45 provided"). In that case, follow the instructions below.
47 To update loaddefs.el (and similar files), do:
52 If either of the above partial procedures fails, try 'make bootstrap'.
53 If CPU time is not an issue, 'make bootstrap' is a more thorough way
54 to rebuild, avoiding spurious problems.
56 Occasionally, there are changes that 'make bootstrap' won't be able to
57 handle. The most thorough cleaning can be achieved by 'git clean -fdx'
58 which will leave you with only files from the git repository. Here
59 are some faster methods for a couple of particular error cases:
61 /usr/bin/m4:aclocal.m4:9: cannot open `m4/count-leading-zeros.m4': No such file or directory
63 This can be fixed with 'rm aclocal.m4'.
65 make: *** No rule to make target 'lib/Makefile.am', needed by 'lib/Makefile.in'
67 This can be fixed with 'rm lib/Makefile Makefile'.
69 Because the repository version of Emacs is a work in progress, it will
70 sometimes fail to build. Please wait a day or so (and check the
71 archives of the emacs-buildstatus, emacs-devel, and bug-gnu-emacs
72 mailing lists) before reporting such problems. In most cases, the
73 problem is known about and is just waiting for someone to fix it.
74 This is especially true for Lisp compilation errors, which are almost
75 never platform-specific.
79 Copyright (C) 2002-2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
81 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
83 GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
84 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
85 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
86 (at your option) any later version.
88 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
89 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
90 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
91 GNU General Public License for more details.
93 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
94 along with GNU Emacs. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.