Elinks installation guidelines ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Quick guide for the impatient: meson setup builddir && cd builddir && meson compile && meson install Alternatively, instead of meson: ./configure && make && make install Check out the bottom of this file if you're upgrading from Links or an older ELinks! And be sure to look at doc/ecmascript.txt if you want (experimental) ECMAScript (that's JavaScript) support. ########## In order to check out the latest tree from GIT: $ git clone check_file_SITES_for_value_of_this $ cd elinks To update your existing tree to the latest GIT version, do: $ git pull ########## If you want to compile ELinks, first check the directory named contrib/, it may contain patches that are of use to you. If you're interested in any of them, try to apply them by doing (for each one): $ patch -p0 < contrib/that-patch They may not apply, since I don't update patches in contrib/ regularly - if you want, feel free to go ahead and update the patch for the current tree and submit the newer version. The compilation itself looks like: Unix - just doing: $ meson setup build $ meson compile -C build should be enough. OS/2 - you can use ./autogen.sh && ./configure. The only supported compiler is EMX, you probably won't be able to compile it with anything else. Configure under OS/2 needs to know paths to gcc, make and bash. Set (for example): SET HOSTTYPE=i586 SET MACHTYPE=i586-pc-os2 SET CONFIG_SHELL=d:/prg/gnu/bin/bash.exe SET CC=d:/prg/emx/bin/gcc.exe SET MAKE=d:/prg/emx/bin/make.exe SET EMXOPT=-h100 DOS, Windows - port it by yourself. Usually, even after strip, the ELinks binary can measure a lot, but you can radically reduce the resulting binary size by throwing out stuff you don't like. Detailed discussion of reducing the executable size can be found in doc/small.txt ########## Ok, now let's install it: Unix - # meson install -C build OS/2 - Copy file elinks.exe somewhere to your path or create CMD file that runs elinks. WARNING: EMX has a nasty limit on open files. Links will work badly or won't work with the default settings. Set the variable EMXOPT=-h100 before you run links. Now, check the contrib/ directory again. There may be some useful config file examples there, along with few support tools and some Lua scripts - you probably want them ;) so just copy hooks.lua to ~/.config/elinks, and edit the configuration part - it adds various functionality to ELinks, like decompression of gzipped files or HTML code rewriting for ELinks-unfriendly websites. !BEWARE! If you _distribute_ an ELinks executable linked with OpenSSL and the OpenSSL library is not part of your base system, you are VIOLATING THE GPL. I honestly believe that for this absurd case no ELinks copyright holder will sue you, and it's not a problem for the OpenSSL people as well, as they have explicitly told me, but you might stay on the safe side. So, people who are making ELinks binaries for systems with no OpenSSL in the base system and who decided to link OpenSSL against the ELinks binary may wish NOT to publish or distribute such an executable, as it's breaking GPL 2(b), if they like to have everything legally perfect (like the Debian people ;-). As a semi-solution to this problem, GNUTLS support was introduced; if you want to distribute ELinks executables with HTTPS support, compile ELinks with the -Dgnutls=true meson option (assuming that you have GNUTLS 1.2.0 installed; we can't say about later versions since GNUTLS people seem to have strange taste wrt. backwards compatibility). HOWEVER, beware that GNUTLS support in ELinks is not so well tested as OpenSSL, and shall be probably still considered experimental. Therfore, it's recommended to the users to give OpenSSL strong preference whenever possible. (Just to show the GNU ideologists how silly can they sometimes be, if not anything else. ;-) ########## If you're upgrading from Links or older ELinks (0.4pre7 or older), you will notice that several things have changed. First, the binary name is elinks, not links, now; however, the basic usage is almost the same and it still looks like the old (E)Links, so you probably want to make a links symlink pointing to elinks. Then, note that configuration files were moved from /etc to /etc/elinks and from ~/.links to ~/.config/elinks, because the name and format of some of them was changed: links.cfg became elinks.conf and you need to convert it with contrib/conv/conf-links2elinks.pl; html.cfg was merged into elinks.conf. bookmarks are still bookmarks, but you need to convert it with old_to_new_bookmarks.sh. links.his became gotohist and the format is the same. history became globhist and the format is the same. cookies are still cookies, but you need to convert it with tr " " "\t". ########## vim: textwidth=80