GNU Emacs Installation Guide Copyright (c) 1988 Free software Foundation, Inc. Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the copyright notice and permission notice are preserved, and that the distributor grants the recipient permission for further redistribution as permitted by this notice. Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions, provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last changed them, and that any new or changed statements about the activities of the Free Software Foundation are approved by the Foundation. PREPARATION 0) Make sure your system has enough swapping space allocated to handle a program whose pure code is 400k bytes or and whose data area is at least 150k and can reach 600k bytes or much more. If the swapping space is insufficient, you will get an error in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump, found in $BUILD/src/ymakefile, or possibly when running the final dumped Emacs. 1) Choose a place in the file structure for the main directory of Emacs code to reside. This will ultimately have subdirectories named src, lisp, etc, etc. Call this name $EMACS. Let $BUILD stand for the name the directory has now. 2) Copy $BUILD/src/config.h-dist to $BUILD/src/config.h, and edit it to set the right options for your system. The file $BUILD/etc/MACHINES may help you decide what to put there. If you need to override any of the definitions in the s- and m- files for your system and machine, do so by editing config.h, not by changing the s- and m- files. Occasionally you may need to redefine parameters used in etc/movemail.c. 3) Declare the place in the file system where Emacs will be once installed. This is done in the file `src/paths.h'. If you are using the shell-script `build-install' edit the `set' command that sets the variable `EMACS'. If you are using `make' in the main Emacs directory to do the installation, edit the definition of `LIBDIR' in `Makefile' in that directory. `build-install' and `make' edit `src/paths.h' automatically. If you are doing the building by hand (not using `build-install' or `make') then you yourself must copy $BUILD/src/paths.h-dist to paths.h, and edit it to contain the correct directory names: $EMACS/lisp for the directory for Lisp libraries, and $EMACS/etc for the directory for executables and text files. Emacs will use these names once it has been built. During building, Emacs searches the directory ../lisp for Lisp files before the directories specified in paths.h, and executable files are found in ../etc. So the main Emacs directory $BUILD can be anywhere while Emacs is built, but must be renamed to $EMACS afterwards in order for Emacs to work properly. 4) Look at $BUILD/lisp/paths.el; if some of those values are not right for your system, create a file $BUILD/lisp/site-init.el containing Lisp code to override them. You would use the Lisp function `setq'. For example, (setq news-inews-program "/usr/bin/inews") is how you would override the default value of the variable news-inews-program (which is "/usr/local/inews"). 5) Put into $BUILD/lisp/site-init.el any Lisp code you want loaded into Emacs before it is dumped out. This file is nonexistent in the distribution. You do not need to create it, if you have nothing to put in it. 6) Decide what compiler switches to use. You might want to replace the `-g' in the file $BUILD/src/ymakefile with `-O'. If you are not running on 4.2 on a vax, it is possible that no debugger you have will be able to run Emacs with its symbol table, so you might as well use `-O' instead. If you do have a debugger that works, it is probably best to use `-g' so that you are not helpless in the face of a problem. 7) If you wish to compile with GCC, you should use -traditional. This is needed for certain include files. For more info, refer the INSTALL file of GCC. 8) Refer to the file $BUILD/etc/TERMS for information on fields you may wish to add to various termcap entries. 9) Run `make' in the main directory of the Emacs distribution to finish building and installing Emacs in the standard way. You are done! BUILDING GNU EMACS The steps below are done by the shell script `build-install' or by running `make' in the main directory of the Emacs distribution. 1) Cd to $BUILD/etc and run `make'. This creates files named `ctags' and `etags' and `wakeup' and `make-docfile' and `digest-doc' and `test-distrib'. And others. 2) Cd to $BUILD/src and Run `make' This refers to files in the $BUILD/lisp and $BUILD/etc subdirectories using names ../lisp and ../etc. This creates a file $BUILD/src/xemacs which is the runnable Emacs, assigning it a new version number by incrementing the version stored in $BUILD/lisp/version.el. It also creates a file in $BUILD/etc, whose name is DOC followed by the current Emacs version. This file contains documentation strings for all the functions in Emacs. Each time you run make to make a new xemacs, a new DOC file with a new name is made. You must keep the DOC file for an Emacs version as long as you keep using that Emacs version. INSTALLATION The steps below are done by the shell script `build-install' or by running `make' in the main directory of the Emacs distribution. 0) mv $BUILD $EMACS if $BUILD and $EMACS are not the same. This moves the main Emacs directory to the name you have told Emacs (via paths.h) it is going to have. 1) Move the file $EMACS/xemacs to /usr/local/bin/emacs, or some other name in users' search paths. `xemacs' has an alternate name $EMACS/src/emacs-EMACSVERSION; you may wish to make a symbolic link named /usr/local/bin/emacs pointing to that alternate name, as an easy way of installing different versions. You can delete $EMACS/src/temacs. 3) Move the programs ctags and etags from $EMACS/etc to /usr/local/bin. These programs are run by users as shell commands. The program $EMACS/etc/loadst is invoked by Emacs when appropriate. The programs $EMACS/etc/make-docfile and $EMACS/etc/test-distrib are not used any more; they were used in building Emacs. $EMACS/etc/digest-doc can be used to convert DOC into a file for users to read. There is no important reason to move it. 4) The files in $EMACS/src subdirectory, except for xemacs, are not used by Emacs once it is built. See the file PROBLEMS in this directory for a list of various problems sometimes encountered, and what to do about them.