Dear GNU Mailutils maintainer,
I was trying out new Mailutils version on an older system in order to
use its `movemail` program for IMAPS -> Maildir backup purpose.
As I was not interested in a library usage of Mailutils, I looked at
configure switches to disable library bindings in `README` file.
Following is one of them that I found:
> --without-python
>
> Do not build Python interface library.
However, when I specified that switch at configure time, I saw something
unexpected as the configuration process ended:
> $ ./configure --prefix=/opt/mailutils-3.15 --without-python --without-guile
> configure: WARNING: unrecognized options: --without-python
> checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
> checking whether build environment is sane... yes
[...]
> Interfaces:
>
> Guile ......................... no
> C++ ........................... no
> Python ........................ yes
[...]
> Before proceeding, verify if these satisfy your requirements.
> configure: WARNING: unrecognized options: --without-python
^ You'd see that the configuration script rejected `--without-python` option
that is described in README. [1]
So I double-checked the available switches by running `./configure --help`;
and the output there shown that the recognized switch to disable
Python binding is not `--without-python`, but rather `--disable-python`...
> $ ./configure --help
> `configure' configures GNU Mailutils 3.15 to adapt to many kinds of systems.
[...]
> --disable-python do not build Python interface
After looking around, I have seen `--disable-python` somewhere
in `NEWS` file which is dated back to Mailutils 3.0 days,
so this is probably just an error in `README` documentation.
Note that this is the latest GNU Mailutils 3.15 (bzip'd source tarball)
which I was trying to build on Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 "Wheezy" i386. [2]
I'm dropping a note here in hope that this documentation bug
would be investigated and fixed when the occasion allows.
Regards,
Nutchanon Wetchasit
[1] Also, after the word "yes" on the Python line, there seemed to be
a space. I'm not sure if it was intended or not.
The other lines in configure script output which have trailing space
were "checking for suffix of executables..." (likely intended)
and "checking for iconv declaration..." (likely not intended).
Trivial issue, but I'll make note of them here for the record anyway.
[2] The build process finally ended up with compilation failure,
due an unrelated reason: attempts to use GnuTLS function calls
and constants which are nonexistent within the on-system GnuTLS version,
from the look of it. I might follow up on this with a separate report,
if later on I could work out which minimal version of GnuTLS
that current Mailutils' code expects de-facto.
