notmuch/INSTALL

Build and install instructions for Notmuch.

Compilation commands
--------------------
The process for compiling and installing Notmuch is the very standard
sequence of:

	./configure
	make
	sudo make install

You can even skip the configure step if all of the dependencies of
Notmuch are satisfied. If they are not, the configure script will
notice that and provide instructions on where to obtain the necessary
dependencies.

Dependencies
------------
Notmuch depends on three libraries: Xapian, GMime 2.4, and Talloc
which are each described below:

	Xapian
	------
	Xapian is the search-engine library underlying Notmuch.

	It provides all the real machinery of indexing and searching,
	(including the very nice parsing of the query string).

	Xapian is available from http://xapian.org

	GMime 2.4
	---------
	GMime 2.4 provides decoding of MIME email messages for Notmuch.

	Without GMime, Notmuch would not be able to extract and index
	the actual text from email message encoded as BASE64, etc.

	GMime 2.4 is available from http://spruce.sourceforge.net/gmime/

	Talloc
	------
	Talloc is a memory-pool allocator used by Notmuch.

	Talloc is an extremely lightweight and easy-to-use tool for
	allocating memory in a hierarchical fashion and then freeing
	it with a single call of the top-level handle. Using it has
	made development of Notmuch much easier and much less prone to
	memory leaks.

	Talloc is available from http://talloc.samba.org/

On a modern, package-based operating system such as Debian, you can
install all of the dependencies with the following simple command
line:

        sudo apt-get install libxapian-dev libgmime-2.4-dev libtalloc-dev

On other systems, a similar command can be used, but the details of
the package names may be different, (such as "devel" in place of
"dev").