Git is available from the Ubuntu repositories in the git-core, git-doc, and git-gui packages (there are other Git-related packages available but I think those three make up a basic installation). The package maintainer’s version tends to be behind the currently available version of Git. To have the latest features and fixes in Git it is necessary to install it from source. This is the process I use to install Git from source on Ubuntu 9.10 (karmic) and 10.04 (lucid):
Download the source archive from http://git-scm.com and extract it (I just extract it where it lands in my Downloads directory). Open a terminal in (or cd to) the extracted Git source directory (~/Downloads/git-1.7.2.1 as of my latest install).
Install required packages:
sudo apt-get install libcurl4-gnutls-dev libexpat1-dev libssl-dev gettext libz-dev asciidoc
Build and install Git and its documentation:
make prefix=/usr/local all doc sudo make prefix=/usr/local install install-doc
If you don’t include the doc and install-doc tasks in the installation then the Git documentation will not be available via man pages or the git help command. If you don’t want the documentation then you can leave out those tasks and you won’t need to install the asciidoc package either. I prefer to have the documentation.
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