1 This directory tree holds version 21.0.100 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 since the last version of Emacs.
13 The file INSTALL in this directory says how to bring up GNU Emacs on
14 Unix, once you have loaded the entire subtree of this directory.
16 The file etc/PROBLEMS contains information on many common problems that
17 occur in building, installing and running Emacs.
19 Reports of bugs in Emacs should be sent to the mailing list
20 bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. See the "Bugs" section of the Emacs
21 manual for more information on how to report bugs. (The file `BUGS'
22 in this directory explains how you can find and read that section
23 using the Info files that come with Emacs.) See `etc/MAILINGLISTS'
24 for more information on mailing lists relating to GNU packages.
26 The `etc' subdirectory contains several other files, named in
27 capital letters, which you should look at when installing GNU Emacs.
29 The file `configure' is a shell script to acclimate Emacs to the
30 oddities of your processor and operating system. It creates the file
31 `Makefile' (a script for the `make' program), which automates the
32 process of building and installing Emacs. See INSTALL for more
35 The file `configure.in' is the input used by the autoconf program to
36 construct the `configure' script. Since Emacs has some configuration
37 requirements that autoconf can't meet directly, and for historical
38 reasons, `configure.in' uses an unholy marriage of custom-baked
39 configuration code and autoconf macros. If you want to rebuild
40 `configure' from `configure.in', you will need to install a recent
41 version of autoconf and GNU m4.
43 The file `Makefile.in' is a template used by `configure' to create
46 The file `make-dist' is a shell script to build a distribution tar
47 file from the current Emacs tree, containing only those files
48 appropriate for distribution. If you make extensive changes to Emacs,
49 this script will help you distribute your version to others.
51 There are several subdirectories:
53 `src' holds the C code for Emacs (the Emacs Lisp interpreter and its
54 primitives, the redisplay code, and some basic editing functions).
55 `lisp' holds the Emacs Lisp code for Emacs (most everything else).
56 `lib-src' holds the source code for some utility programs for use by
57 or with Emacs, like movemail and etags.
58 `etc' holds miscellaneous architecture-independent data files
59 Emacs uses, like the tutorial text and the Zippy the Pinhead quote
60 database. The contents of the `lisp', `info' and `man'
61 subdirectories are architecture-independent too.
63 `info' holds the Info documentation tree for Emacs.
64 `man' holds the source code for the Emacs manual. If you modify the
65 manual sources, you will need the `makeinfo' program to produce
66 an updated manual. `makeinfo' is part of the GNU Texinfo
67 package; you need version 4.0 or later of Texinfo.
69 Note that the Emacs Lisp manual sources are distributed separately.
70 (They are twice as large as the Emacs manual in the man subdirectory.)
72 `msdos' holds configuration files for compiling Emacs under MSDOG.
73 `vms' holds instructions and useful files for running Emacs under VMS.
74 `nt' holds various command files and documentation files that pertain
75 to running Emacs on Windows NT.
76 `mac' holds instructions, sources, and other useful files for building
77 and running Emacs on the Mac.
79 Building Emacs on non-Posix platforms requires to install tools
80 that aren't part of the standard distribution of the OS. The
81 platform-specific README files and installation instructions should
82 list the required tools.