GNU Zile is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL.
Copyright (c) 1997-2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright notice and this notice are preserved.
GNU Zile (Zile Implements Lua Editors) is a text editor development kit, so that you can (relatively) quickly develop your own ideal text editor without reinventing the wheel for many of the common algorithms and structures needed to do so.
It comes with an example implementation of a lightweight Emacs clone, called Zmacs. Every Emacs user should feel at home with Zmacs. Zmacs is aimed at small footprint systems and quick editing sessions (it starts up and shuts down instantly).
Zile and Zmacs are written in Lua 5.2 using POSIX APIs, and hence requires a Lua 5.2 runtime and a few additional Lua modules:
- Lua-stdlib
- lrexlib the
rex_gnumodule must be built - luaposix the curses module must be built
- alien
For exact version dependencies, see require_version statments in
bin/zmacs. These are most easily installed using LuaRocks.
- See file AUTHORS for the names of maintainers past and present.
- See file COPYING for copying conditions.
- See file FAQ for a selection of a Frequently Answered Questions.
- See file INSTALL for generic compilation and installation instructions.
- See file NEWS for a list of major changes in each Zile release.
- See file THANKS for a list of important contributors.
The rest of the files in the top-level directory are part of the Autotools build system used to compile and install Zile and Zmacs.
- Directory build-aux contains helper scripts used to build Zile.
- Directory doc contains files used to create Zile's documentation.
- Directory m4 contains a mixture of gnulib supplied and Zile- specific macros for rebuilding the `configure' script.
- Directory lib contains the source code used to build Zile, and the other editors that use it.
- There is a GNU Zile home page with information about Zile.
- GNU Zile development is co-ordinated from the Zile project page at GNU Savannah.
- GNU maintains an archive of past releases. This is a mirror for faster downloads and to reduce stress on the main GNU machine.
Questions, comments and requests should be sent to the Zile users list.
See REPORTING BUGS below for the bug reporting mailing list address.
If you are just building GNU Zile from an official release,
you should not normally need to run ./bootstrap or autoreconf; just
go ahead and start with ./configure.
If you are trying to build GNU Zile from the development sources,
./configure will not work until the ./bootstrap script has completed
successfully.
We archive compressed tarballs of all recent GNU Zile releases.
Additionally, we sometimes upload compressed tarballs of unstable prereleases.
Official tarballs are supplied with a GnuPG detached signature file so that you can verify that the corresponding tarball is still the same file that was released by the owner of its GPG key ID. First, be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding release:
wget http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/zile/zile-2.3.24.tar.gz
wget http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/zile/zile-2.3.24.tar.gz.sig
then run a command like this:
gpg --verify zile-2.3.24.tar.gz.sig
If that command fails because you don't have the required public key, then run this command to import it:
gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 80EE4A00
and then rerun the gpg --verify command.
Generic instructions for how to build GNU Zile from a release tarball are contained in the file INSTALL.
If you are missing any of the prerequisite libraries needed to
successfully build GNU Zile, the configure script will abort itself
and tell you right away.
Zile development sources are maintained at the GNU Savannah git server. You can fetch a read-only copy with either:
git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/zile.git
or using the CVS pserver protocol:
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@pserver.git.sv.gnu.org:/srv/git/zile.git \
co -d zile HEAD
If you are behind a firewall that blocks the git protocol, you can force git to transparently rewrite all savannah references to use http:
git config --global url.http://git.sv.gnu.org/r/.insteadof \
git://git.sv.gnu.org/
When you are building GNU Zile from a git checkout, you first need to
run the bootstrap script to generate various files that are shipped in
release tarballs, but not checked in to git.
Normally, you just need to run ./bootstrap, and it will either get
everything ready so that you can then run ./configure as would for a
release tarball, or else tell you if your machine is missing some
packages that it needs in order to do that.
If this distribution doesn't work for you, before you report the problem, please try upgrading to the latest released version first, to see whether your issue has been fixed already. If you can, please also check whether the latest development sources for the next release still exhibit the problem (see OBTAINING THE LATEST SOURCES above).
Please send bug reports, feature requests and patches to the [bug mailing list], preferably, file them directly in the relevant tracker at GNU Savannah.
When you are ready to submit a report, first, please read this.
Zile has a suite of Lisp tests in the tests directory of the source distribution, which you can run with:
make check
If, when you report a bug, you can create a similar test that demonstrates it, the maintainers will be most grateful, and it will prevent them from accidentally reintroducing the bug in a subsequent release.