fish-shell/INSTALL

Known issues
============

Fish currently requires a semi-modern GCC version to
compile. Specifically, GCC 2.95.* won't compile fish, but GCC 3.2.3 is
known to work. Fish has not been coded with an C99- or GNU-specific
features in mind, so it is hoped that it should be possible to make
fish work with other compilers. Patches are welcome.

Older versions of Doxygen has bugs in the man-page generation which
cause the builtin help to render incorrectly. Doxygen 1.2.14 is known
to have this problem.


Prerequisites
=============

Fish requires the following programs and libraries to build:

 - Doxygen
 - Curses or Ncurses
 - GNU make
 - GCC

fish also relies on standard unix tools such as cat, cut, grep, sed,
whoami, bc and echo. Fish does not yet support cross-compilation,
separate build directories or any other fancy configure options.


Simple install procedure
========================

If you have downloaded the darcs repository of fish, you need to run
the autoconf command first. Then use the following commands to compile
fish:

 % ./configure
 % make                                   # Compile fish
 % make install                           # Install fish
 % echo /usr/local/bin/fish >>/etc/shells # Add fish to list of shells

If you wish to use fish as your default shell, use the following
command:

 % chsh -s /usr/local/bin/fish			 

chsh will prompt you for your password, and change your default shell.


Local install procedure
=======================

If you have downloaded the darcs repository of fish, you need to run
autoconf to generate the configure script.

To install fish in your own home directory (typically as non-root),
type:

 % ./configure --prefix=$HOME
 % make					# Compile fish
 % make install			# Install fish

You will not be able to use fish as the default shell unless you also
add the corresponding line to /etc/shells, which mostly defeats the
point of a local install. As a workaround, you can add fish as the
last command of the init files for your regular shell.