1 This directory tree holds version 21.0.103 of GNU Emacs, the extensible,
2 customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor.
4 You may encounter bugs in this release. If you do, please report
5 them; your bug reports are valuable contributions to the FSF, since
6 they allow us to notice and fix problems on machines we don't have, or
7 in code we don't use often. See the file BUGS for more information on
10 See the file etc/NEWS for information on new features and other
11 user-visible changes in recent versions of Emacs.
13 The file INSTALL in this directory says how to bring up GNU Emacs on
14 various systems, once you have loaded the entire subtree of this
17 The file etc/PROBLEMS contains information on many common problems that
18 occur in building, installing and running Emacs.
20 Reports of bugs in Emacs should be sent to the mailing list
21 bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. See the "Bugs" section of the Emacs
22 manual for more information on how to report bugs. (The file `BUGS'
23 in this directory explains how you can find and read that section
24 using the Info files that come with Emacs.) See `etc/MAILINGLISTS'
25 for more information on mailing lists relating to GNU packages.
27 The `etc' subdirectory contains several other files, named in capital
28 letters, which you might consider looking at when installing GNU
31 The file `configure' is a shell script to acclimate Emacs to the
32 oddities of your processor and operating system. It creates the file
33 `Makefile' (a script for the `make' program), which automates the
34 process of building and installing Emacs. See INSTALL for more
37 The file `configure.in' is the input used by the autoconf program to
38 construct the `configure' script. Since Emacs has some configuration
39 requirements that autoconf can't meet directly, and for historical
40 reasons, `configure.in' uses an unholy marriage of custom-baked
41 configuration code and autoconf macros. If you want to rebuild
42 `configure' from `configure.in', you will need to install a recent
43 version of autoconf and GNU m4.
45 The file `Makefile.in' is a template used by `configure' to create
48 The file `make-dist' is a shell script to build a distribution tar
49 file from the current Emacs tree, containing only those files
50 appropriate for distribution. If you make extensive changes to Emacs,
51 this script will help you distribute your version to others.
53 There are several subdirectories:
55 `src' holds the C code for Emacs (the Emacs Lisp interpreter and its
56 primitives, the redisplay code, and some basic editing functions).
57 `lisp' holds the Emacs Lisp code for Emacs (most everything else).
58 `lib-src' holds the source code for some utility programs for use by
59 or with Emacs, like movemail and etags.
60 `etc' holds miscellaneous architecture-independent data files
61 Emacs uses, like the tutorial text and the Zippy the Pinhead quote
62 database. The contents of the `lisp', `info' and `man'
63 subdirectories are architecture-independent too.
65 `info' holds the Info documentation tree for Emacs.
66 `man' holds the source code for the Emacs Manual. If you modify the
67 manual sources, you will need the `makeinfo' program to produce
68 an updated manual. `makeinfo' is part of the GNU Texinfo
69 package; you need version 4.0 or later of Texinfo.
71 Note that the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual sources are distributed
72 separately. (They are twice as large as the Emacs Manual in the man
75 `msdos' holds configuration files for compiling Emacs under MSDOG.
76 `vms' holds instructions and useful files for running Emacs under VMS.
77 `nt' holds various command files and documentation files that pertain
78 to running Emacs on Windows NT.
79 `mac' holds instructions, sources, and other useful files for building
80 and running Emacs on the Mac.
82 Building Emacs on non-Posix platforms requires to install tools
83 that aren't part of the standard distribution of the OS. The
84 platform-specific README files and installation instructions should
85 list the required tools.