Re: downloading and compiling from source
This is great, thanks Todd. I'll look into building my .deb package,
certainly sounds like the best way forward, although quite daunting
having had a brief look :0)
Jamie
On Sat, 2008-03-08 at 10:47 -0500, Todd Zullinger wrote:
> Jamie Griffin wrote:
> > I'm new to Linux and bought my machine with ubuntu 7.10 this week.
> > I've been using Mac osx for the last 6 months and so i'm still very
> > much in the learning stages.
>
> Enjoy. :)
>
> > I've got a lot of stuff to read to teach myself, but having been
> > using Mutt on my Mac i want to get it up and running on my Linux
> > machine as quickly as possible.
>
> Using the packages from Ubuntu might be the fastest way. After you
> get more comfortable, if you find that you want to enable different
> compile time options or patches than what is included in the ubuntu
> package, you can do that.
>
> Of course, if you're used to building from source on osx, building on
> linux shouldn't be much different. You'd just need to get the build
> dependencies installed. For something like mutt that is already
> packaged, you can use apt to do this. Something like:
>
> apt-get builddep mutt
>
> (Check the man page, as I'm going from memory, and I haven't had any
> caffeine nor sugar yet today. :)
>
> > Before i attempt it, i wanted to ask for some tips on how best to
> > download the source and build it myself (presumably using
> > ./configure, make and make install commands).
>
> That would do it. There are a large number of options you can pass to
> configure to enable and disable various features, some of which you
> probably want to use. See ./configure --help for a listing.
>
> > also, which directory should i compile it in - is there one i should
> > use/create for programs like Mutt? On my Mac system, i had it
> > installed in /sw as i followed some instruction from a site i found
> > on the web, but i don't fully understand why this directory was
> > used?
>
> That's mostly just personal preference. Most of the time, I build
> things as packages, but if I'm building from source, I use something
> like ~/src as the location for building.
>
> I would suggest doing the configure and make steps as a normal user,
> and only using root for the make install portion. Even better than
> that would be to build your .deb package. That gives you the benefits
> of compiling your own mutt from source (your own configure options,
> patches, etc) as well as the benefits of having mutt installed via
> package (you can use dpkg to query the package contents, easily
> install that package on any other systems you have, easily remove it,
> etc).
>
> While learning to build packages isn't something you'll likely learn
> to do in the first few days of using your new system, it's not really
> much harder than learning to build the software via configure; make;
> make install. I find it highly valuable. I have more experience
> building rpm packages than debs, but I setup a Debian box for some
> testing a while back and learned how to create basic .deb packages in
> an afternoon, by skimming through the Debian New Maintainers' Guide at
> http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/
>
> > I'm aware i could use sudo apt-get install, but wasn't sure if this
> > would install an older version of Mutt, or indeed if it's best to
> > avoid this and install it manually.
>
> Looking at http://packages.ubuntu.com/ it appears that Ubuntu 7.10
> ships with mutt-1.5.15. So the package is a few revisions behind. If
> you want the most recent version, you'll need to build it from source
> (or rebuild the .deb package from the forthcoming Ubuntu release:
> http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/mutt).
>