Installing emacs for mac from sources: execute ./configure but 'no such file or directory'

Question

I'm a beginner in this area. I have cloned the sources of emacs from github. As stated in INSTALL file, I executed ./configure but the terminal showed 'no such file or directory'.

I checked the files. There are two similar files, configure.in and config.bat. I don't know whether these two files is relevant to the installment.

Thank you very much.

Answer 1

The latest emacs sources aren't compatible with the autotools shipped with OSX, so you can't generate ./configure in the usual way. However, the developers have provided a workaround by allowing you to run the following in the root of the emacs source tree:

./autogen/copy_autogen

After that, go ahead with the usual

./configure --with-ns --without-dbus

or similar.

Also, I'm not sure that there's an up-to-date mirror of the emacs sources on github. If you're set on using git instead of bzr (the "native" SCM for emacs developers), clone the following (more official) repo instead:

http://git.sv.gnu.org/r/emacs.git

A good choice might be to use a Mac package manager like homebrew, with which you can install the latest emacs code like this:

brew install --head emacs

But as Chris says, definitely consider downloading a nightly build from emacsformacosx.com instead.