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## 3 Installation

ERC may be compiled and installed on your machine.

This section may be skipped if you are using the version of ERC that comes with Emacs.

##### Compilation

This is an optional step, since Emacs Lisp source code does not necessarily have to be byte-compiled. It will yield a speed increase, though.

A working copy of Emacs or XEmacs is needed in order to compile ERC. By default, the program that is installed with the name `emacs` will be used.

If you want to use the `xemacs` binary to perform the compilation, you would need to edit `Makefile` in the top-level directory as follows. You can put either a full path to an Emacs or XEmacs binary or just the command name, as long as it is in the `PATH`.

         EMACS    = xemacs
         SITEFLAG = -no-site-file

Running `make` should compile the ERC source files in the `lisp` directory.

##### Installation

ERC may be installed into your file hierarchy by doing the following.

Edit the `Makefile` file so that `ELISPDIR` points to where you want the source and compiled ERC files to be installed and `INFODIR` indicates where to put the ERC manual. Of course, you will want to edit `EMACS` and `SITEFLAG` as shown in the Compilation section if you are using XEmacs.

If you are installing ERC on a Debian system, you might want to change the value of `INSTALLINFO` as specified in `Makefile`.

Run `make` as a normal user.

Run `make install` as the root user if you have chosen installation locations that require this.