Copyright (C) 2002-2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc. See the end of the file for license conditions. Building and Installing Emacs from the Repository 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). automake - at least the version specified near the start of configure.ac (in the AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE command). makeinfo - not strictly necessary, but highly recommended, so that you can build the manuals. The `autogen.sh' script can help you figure out if you have the necessary tools. The first time you build, there are a couple of extra steps. First, generate the `configure' script and some related files: $ ./autogen.sh (or you can just run `autoreconf -i -I m4'). You can then configure your build (use `./configure --help' to see options you can set): $ ./configure If you want later builds to go faster, at the expense of sometimes doing the wrong thing if you update the build procedure, you can invoke "./configure -C" instead. Some of the files that are included in the Emacs tarball, such as byte-compiled Lisp files, are not stored in the repository. Therefore, to build from the repository you must run "make bootstrap" instead of just "make": $ make bootstrap Normally, it is not necessary to use "make bootstrap" after every update from the repository. "make" should work in 90% of the cases and be much quicker. $ 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. 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, 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. 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. 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 .