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.

- Autoconf <http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/>
- Automake <http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/>
- Bison <http://www.gnu.org/software/bison/>
- M4 <http://www.gnu.org/software/m4/>
- Gettext <http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/>
- Git <http://git.or.cz>
- Gzip <http://www.gnu.org/software/gzip/>
- Texinfo <http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo>
- Wget <http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/>

Up-to-date compilers and libraries are also recommended, for better
static checking.  You may be able to use an older compiler by building
with 'make WERROR_CFLAGS='; if so, don't worry about its false alarms.

Valgrind <http://valgrind.org/> is also highly recommended, if
Valgrind supports your architecture.

* 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.
There are lots of options that you may find useful in this case.
See './bootstrap --help' for a detailed list.

Bootstrapping obtains Gnulib and Paxutils files from their Git
repositories on Savannah.  Then, it fetches translations from the
Translation Project, and, finally, it builds files useful for
configuration.  Simply running ./bootstrap without arguments should do
in most cases.

The file bootstrap.conf contains bootstrapping configuration.
Several options are provided that modify its behavior.
Run './bootstrap --help' for a list.

To only fetch auxiliary files from the network, run './bootstrap --pull'.
To only generate files such as 'configure', without accessing the
network, run './bootstrap --gen'.


* Copyright information

Copyright 2007-2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

This file is part of GNU tar.

GNU tar 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 tar 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 this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

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