4.1 Cloning The Repo

Clone the Savannah repo using ‘git clone’. You may do so using either the native Git protocol, or using HTTP if you must go through a gateway or firewall that won’t pass the Git protocol.

To choose which method, you supply a URL for the repo when you clone it, as follows.

• Clone via the Git native protocol:

  $ git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/gawk.git     Clone the repo
  -| ...
  $ cd gawk                                           Start working
  

  This will be faster, but not all firewalls pass the Git protocol on through.

• Clone via the HTTP protocol:

  $ git clone http://git.savannah.gnu.org/r/gawk.git  Clone the repo
  -| ...
  $ cd gawk                                           Start working
  

You only need to clone the repo once. From then on, you update its contents using other Git commands. For example, after coming back from your vacation in the Bahamas:

$ cd gawk               Move to the repo
$ make distclean        A good idea before updating
-| ...
$ git pull              Update it

To build, you should generally follow this recipe:

$ ./bootstrap.sh && ./configure && make -j && make check

NOTE: Unless you have installed all the tools described in GNU Tools, you must run ./bootstrap.sh every time you clone a repo, do a ‘git pull’ or checkout a different branch. (In the latter case, do ‘make distclean’ first.) Otherwise things will get messy very quickly. The bootstrap.sh script ensures that all of the file time stamps are up to date so that it’s not necessary to run the various configuration tools.