Building and Installing Emacs from CVS

Some of the files that are included in the Emacs tarball, such as
byte-compiled Lisp files, are not stored in the CVS repository.
Therefore, to build from CVS you must run "make bootstrap"
instead of just "make":

  $ ./configure
  $ make bootstrap

The bootstrap process makes sure all necessary files are rebuilt
before it builds the final Emacs binary.

Normally, it is not necessary to use "make bootstrap" after every CVS
update.  Unless there are problems, we suggest the following
procedure:

  $ ./configure
  $ make
  $ cd lisp
  $ make recompile EMACS=../src/emacs
  $ cd ..
  $ 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" will need be updated to
reflect new autoloaded functions.  If you see errors about undefined
lisp functions during compilation, that may be the reason.  Another
symptom may be an error saying that "loaddefs.el" could not be found;
this is due to a change in the way loaddefs.el was handled in CVS, and
should only happen once, for users that are updating old CVS trees.

To update loaddefs.el, do:

  $ cd lisp
  $ make autoloads EMACS=../src/emacs

If either of the above partial procedures fails, try "make bootstrap".

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, except that the value of the
EMACS variable on the Make command line might be different, e.g.,
../bin/emacs.exe or some such.

Questions, requests, and bug reports about the CVS versions of Emacs
should be sent to emacs-pretest-bug@gnu.org rather than gnu.emacs.help
or gnu.emacs.bug.  Ideally, use M-x report-emacs-bug RET which will
send it to the proper place.


Note on using SSH to access the CVS repository from inside Emacs
----------------------------------------------------------------

Write access to the CVS repository requires using SSH v2.

If you execute cvs commands inside Emacs, specifically if you use
pcl-cvs, output from CVS may be lost due to a problem in the
interface between ssh, cvs, and libc.  Corrupted checkins have
also been rumored to have happened.

To fix the problem, save the following script into a file, make it
executable, and set CVS_RSH to the file name of the script:

#!/bin/bash
exec 2> >(exec cat >&2 2>/dev/null)
exec ssh "$@"

This may be combined with the following entry in ~/.ssh/config to
simplify accessing the CVS repository:

Host subversions.gnu.org
     Protocol 2
     ForwardX11 no
     User YOUR_USERID