Building and Installing Emacs from the Repository

Simply run 'make'. This should work if your files are freshly checked

out from the repository, and if you have the proper tools installed.

If it doesn't work, or if you have special build requirements, the

following information may be helpful.

Building Emacs from the source-code repository requires some tools

that are not needed when building from a release. You will need:

autoconf - at least the version specified near the start of

configure.ac (in the AC_PREREQ command).

git - at least Git 1.7.1. If your repository was created by an older

Git version, you may need to reclone it.

makeinfo - not strictly necessary, but highly recommended, so that

you can build the manuals. GNU Texinfo 4.13 or later should work.

To use the autotools, run the following shell command to generate the

'configure' script and some related files, and to set up your git

configuration:

$ ./autogen.sh all

You can then configure your build as follows:

$ ./configure

The 'configure' script has many options; run './configure --help' to

see them. For example, if you want later builds to go faster, albeit

sometimes doing the wrong thing if you update the build procedure, you

can invoke './configure -C'. After configuring, build Emacs as follows:

$ make

If you want to install Emacs, 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. 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 autoloads

If either of the above partial procedures fails, try 'make bootstrap'.

If CPU time is not an issue, 'make bootstrap' is the most thorough way

to rebuild, and avoid any spurious problems.

Because the repository version of Emacs is a work in progress, it will

sometimes fail to build. Please wait a day or so (and check the

archives of the emacs-buildstatus, emacs-devel, and bug-gnu-emacs

mailing lists) before reporting such problems. In most cases, the

problem is known about and is just waiting for someone to fix it.

This is especially true for Lisp compilation errors, which are almost

never platform-specific.

Copyright (C) 2002-2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

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/>.