fish-shell/INSTALL

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

Fish is developed using GCC, with the goal of using only C89 language
features. Fish does, however use the *wprintf family of functions,
which are new to the C99 standrard. It is not unlikely that any given
release contains a few GCC:isms, but ICC 9.0.030 has been found to
produce working binaries. GCC 2.95.* won't compile fish, but GCC 3.2.3
is known to work. Patches to fix any remaining GNU:isms 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
========================

Always begin by uninstalling any previous fish versions. This is done
by running the command 'make uninstall' in the source directory of
your previous fish installation.

Next, if you have downloaded a fresh copy of the git repository of
fish, you need to run the 'autoconf' command.

Then, use 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

Finally, 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.

To switch your default shell back, you can run:

 % chsh -s /bin/bash

Substitute /bin/bash with /bin/tcsh or /bin/zsh as appropriate.

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

If you have downloaded the git 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.