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). >
