Git 1.7.5.1 from git on ubuntu

I really like git. It has an excellent suite of tools bundled with it from the start and it gets lots of updates and active development. Today I was looking at the latest git version (1.7.4) because I was installing it on a new machine and, as usual with new versions of things, I perused the release notes. What really caught my eye was this:

 * "git log -G<pattern>" limits the output to commits whose change has
   added or deleted lines that match the given pattern.

I don’t know about you guys, but I fake that feature 2 or 3 times a month by just doing git log -p | grep foo -C50. It’s not nearly as nice as it catches other things, breaks color, etc. Anyway, I decided that instead of waiting for my already non-standard ubuntu repo to catch up, I’d just build it.

First, I checked out git with my installed git:

git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git

That will take a while, so while that’s going on install

build-essential
autoconf
asciidoc
libcurl4-openssl-dev
gettext

Note that asciidoc tries to pull in a ton of TeX junk. Don’t let it, you don’t need that at all.

Once that’s done do something like the following:

make configure
./configure --prefix=/opt --with-libpcre
make -j5 all
make doc html
sudo make install install-doc install-html

I used the prefix because I’d rather not install on top of my existing stuff; you might want to install to home. --with-libpcre lets you use perl compatible regular expressions in git grep. For some reason you can build the code in parallel (-j5 all) but not the docs (doc html).

Anyway, after doing that ensure that $prefix/bin is in your path and enjoy a brand new git!


(The following includes affiliate links.)

If you’re interested in learning more about Git, I cannot recommend Pro Git enough. It’s an excellent book that will explain how to use Git day-to-day, how to do more unusual things like set up Git hosting, and underlying data structures that will make the model that is Git make more sense.

Posted Wed, Mar 2, 2011

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