Git installation Normally you can just do "make" followed by "make install", and that will install the git programs in your own ~/bin/ directory. If you want to do a global install, you can do $ make prefix=/usr all doc ;# as yourself # make prefix=/usr install install-doc ;# as root (or prefix=/usr/local, of course). Just like any program suite that uses $prefix, the built results have some paths encoded, which are derived from $prefix, so "make all; make prefix=/usr install" would not work. Alternatively you can use autoconf generated ./configure script to set up install paths (via config.mak.autogen), so you can write instead $ make configure ;# as yourself $ ./configure --prefix=/usr ;# as yourself $ make all doc ;# as yourself # make install install-doc ;# as root Issues of note: - git normally installs a helper script wrapper called "git", which conflicts with a similarly named "GNU interactive tools" program. Tough. Either don't use the wrapper script, or delete the old GNU interactive tools. None of the core git stuff needs the wrapper, it's just a convenient shorthand and while it is documented in some places, you can always replace "git commit" with "git-commit" instead. But let's face it, most of us don't have GNU interactive tools, and even if we had it, we wouldn't know what it does. I don't think it has been actively developed since 1997, and people have moved over to graphical file managers. - You can use git after building but without installing if you wanted to. Various git commands need to find other git commands and scripts to do their work, so you would need to arrange a few environment variables to tell them that their friends will be found in your built source area instead of at their standard installation area. Something like this works for me: GIT_EXEC_PATH=`pwd` PATH=`pwd`:$PATH GITPERLLIB=`pwd`/perl/blib/lib export GIT_EXEC_PATH PATH GITPERLLIB - Git is reasonably self-sufficient, but does depend on a few external programs and libraries: - "zlib", the compression library. Git won't build without it. - "openssl". The git-rev-list program uses bignum support from openssl, and unless you specify otherwise, you'll also get the SHA1 library from here. If you don't have openssl, you can use one of the SHA1 libraries that come with git (git includes the one from Mozilla, and has its own PowerPC and ARM optimized ones too - see the Makefile). - "libcurl" and "curl" executable. git-http-fetch and git-fetch use them. If you do not use http transfer, you are probably OK if you do not have them. - expat library; git-http-push uses it for remote lock management over DAV. Similar to "curl" above, this is optional. - "GNU diff" to generate patches. Of course, you don't _have_ to generate patches if you don't want to, but let's face it, you'll be wanting to. Or why did you get git in the first place? Non-GNU versions of the diff/patch programs don't generally support the unified patch format (which is the one git uses), so you really do want to get the GNU one. Trust me, you will want to do that even if it wasn't for git. There's no point in living in the dark ages any more. - "wish", the Tcl/Tk windowing shell is used in gitk to show the history graphically - "ssh" is used to push and pull over the net - "perl" and POSIX-compliant shells are needed to use most of the barebone Porcelainish scripts. - Some platform specific issues are dealt with Makefile rules, but depending on your specific installation, you may not have all the libraries/tools needed, or you may have necessary libraries at unusual locations. Please look at the top of the Makefile to see what can be adjusted for your needs. You can place local settings in config.mak and the Makefile will include them. Note that config.mak is not distributed; the name is reserved for local settings. - To build and install documentation suite, you need to have the asciidoc/xmlto toolchain. Alternatively, pre-formatted documentation are available in "html" and "man" branches of the git repository itself. For example, you could: $ mkdir manual && cd manual $ git init-db $ git fetch-pack git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git man html | while read a b do echo $a >.git/$b done $ cp .git/refs/heads/man .git/refs/heads/master $ git checkout to checkout the pre-built man pages. Also in this repository: $ git checkout html would instead give you a copy of what you see at: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/