emacs/INSTALL.CVS

Copyright (C) 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
  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.

Because the CVS version of Emacs is a work in progress, it will
sometimes fail to build.  Please wait a day or so (and check the bug
and development mailing list archives) before reporting such problems.
In most cases, the problem is known about and is just waiting for
someone to fix it.


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.

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but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
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You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
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