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INSTALL: document a simpler way to run uninstalled builds
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The new scripts automatically saved in the bin-wrappers directory allow
you to run a build when you have neither installed git nor tweaked
environment variables.  Mention this in INSTALL, along with the slight
performance issue of doing so.

This can be especially handy for manually testing network-invoked git
(from ssh, web servers, or similar), but it is also handy with a plain
command prompt.

Signed-off-by: Matthew Ogilvie <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <[email protected]>
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Matthew Ogilvie authored and gitster committed Dec 3, 2009
1 parent e4597aa commit 9045801
Showing 1 changed file with 11 additions and 7 deletions.
18 changes: 11 additions & 7 deletions INSTALL
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -38,13 +38,17 @@ Issues of note:
Interactive Tools package still can install "git", but you can build it
with --disable-transition option to avoid this.

- You can use git after building but without installing if you
wanted to. Various git commands need to find other git
commands and scripts to do their work, so you would need to
arrange a few environment variables to tell them that their
friends will be found in your built source area instead of at
their standard installation area. Something like this works
for me:
- You can use git after building but without installing if you want
to test drive it. Simply run git found in bin-wrappers directory
in the build directory, or prepend that directory to your $PATH.
This however is less efficient than running an installed git, as
you always need an extra fork+exec to run any git subcommand.

It is still possible to use git without installing by setting a few
environment variables, which was the way this was done
traditionally. But using git found in bin-wrappers directory in
the build directory is far simpler. As a historical reference, the
old way went like this:

GIT_EXEC_PATH=`pwd`
PATH=`pwd`:$PATH
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