annotate INSTALL.CVS @ 95704:c8c89a82ad33

Clarify why `make bootstrap' sometimes fails.

Copyright (C) 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008
  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
  $ ./configure
  $ make bootstrap

The bootstrap process makes sure all necessary files are rebuilt
before it builds the final Emacs binary.  Unfortunately, it doesn't
always work when there are stale files from a previous build in the
directory tree.

So if 'make bootstrap' fails, it may be necessary first to do 'make
maintainer-clean' to clear out these stale files.  You can then try
again, starting with `./configure'.  (Occasionally the loaddefs.el
file gets into a bad state due to changes in the Lisp libraries; this
procedure forces it to be regenerated.)

Normally, it is not necessary to use "make bootstrap" after every CVS
update.  Unless there are problems, we suggest using the following
alternative procedure after you have done "make bootstrap" at least
once:

  $ ./configure
  $ make
  $ cd lisp
  $ make recompile EMACS=../src/emacs
  $ cd ..
  $ 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 EMACS=../src/emacs

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, except that the value of the
EMACS variable on the Make command line might be different, e.g.,
../bin/emacs.exe or some such.

Questions, requests, and bug reports about the CVS versions of Emacs
should be sent to [e-mail] 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.


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.

GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with GNU Emacs.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.