4.1 Cloning The Repo

Clone the Savannah repo using ‘git clone’. You should do so using using the HTTPS protocol; HTTPS is considered to be more secure than the native Git protocol and is preferred.⁴

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

$ git clone https://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.