tar/README-hacking

These notes intend to help people working on the Git version of
this package.

* Requirements

You need the following packages to build the Git version of GNU
tar.  We do not make any efforts to accommodate older versions of
these packages, so please make sure that you have the latest stable
version. 

- Automake <http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/>
- Autoconf <http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/>
- M4 <http://www.gnu.org/software/m4/>
- Texinfo <http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo>
- Gnulib <http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib> 
- Git <http://git.or.cz>

* Bootstrapping

Obviously, if you are reading these notes, you did manage to clone
tar from Git. The next step is to get other files needed to build,
which are extracted from other source packages: 

1. Change to the source tree directory

   cd tar

2. Run

   ./bootstrap 

Once done, proceed as described in the file README (section
INSTALLATION).

Normally you will have to run bootstrap only once. However, if you
intend to hack on GNU tar, you might need to run it again later. In
this case, you will probably want to save some time and bandwidth by
avoiding downloading the same files again. If so, create in GNU tar
root directory the file named `.bootstrap' with the following
contents:

   --gnulib-srcdir=$HOME/gnulib

Replace `$HOME/gnulib' with the actual directory where the Gnulib
sources reside.
   
For more information about `bootstrap', run `bootstrap --help'.


* Copyright information

 Copyright (C) 2007, 2008, 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies
 of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the
 copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved,
 thus giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.

 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions
 of this document, or of portions of it,
 under the above conditions, provided also that they
 carry prominent notices stating who last changed them.

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