Re: Git building is borked

["Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org>]

Anton Altaparmakov <aia21@cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> But now I put the git-gui mentions back into the Makefile and tried  
> again it still fails.  Looking at it closer it actually requires me  
> to compile within a checked out git tree, i.e. including the .git  
> directory and all its contents!  That seems even weirder than  
> requiring git to be installed in the first place...

What version of Git specifically are you building with?  How did
you obtain these source files?

Release tarballs of Git contain a git-gui/credits file that makes
CREDITS-GEN avoid invoking the not-yet-existing Git.  Building
git-gui without this file does require not only a working Git
installation, but also the git-gui object database.  Both of these
are readily available on a Git hacker's system, and on any system
that is attempting to create a release tarball.

There are other files included in the release tarballs (version,
git-gui/version) that are also required to get a correct build when
you don't have Git installed, or are missing its object database.
Having these missing does not stop the build process, but it does
make the output of `git version` and `git gui version` relatively
useless.


So you need to be bootstrapping from a released *.tar.{gz,bz2},
which can be found here:

  http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/


Sadly, simply downloading the source files from a random gitweb
doesn't work anymore.  Yes, I know, my fault.  ;-)

-- 
Shawn.