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:
configure.ac (in the AC_PREREQ command).
automake - at least the version specified near the start of
configure.ac (in the AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE command).
-pkg-config - at least version specified in the PKG_PROG_PKG_CONFIG
- command in configure.ac
makeinfo - not strictly necessary, but highly recommended, so that
you can build the manuals.
If you want to install Emacs, type 'make install' instead of 'make' in
the last command.
+After your first build, you can usually just run 'make' after any
+updates from the Savannah repository or local edits; the makefile
+contains logic to re-run configure as needed. However, if the autoconf
+input files have changed, or in some other situations, you will need
+to run 'make bootstrap' (more below).
+
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
If CPU time is not an issue, 'make bootstrap' is the most thorough way
to rebuild, and avoid any spurious problems.
-Users of non-Posix systems (MS-Windows, etc.) should run the
-platform-specific configuration scripts ('nt/configure.bat',
-'config.bat', etc.) before 'make'; the rest of the procedure is
-applicable to those systems as well.
-
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