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

In fact, if you don't plan to pass any arguments to the configure
script, then you can skip that step and just start with "make", (which
will call configure for you). See this command:

	./configure --help

for detailed documentation of the things you can control at the
configure stage.

Dependencies
------------
Notmuch depends on four libraries: Xapian, GMime 2.4 or 2.6,
Talloc, and zlib 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

	Note: Notmuch will work best with Xapian 1.0.18 (or later) or
	Xapian 1.1.4 (or later). Previous versions of Xapian (whether
	1.0 or 1.1) had a performance bug that made notmuch very slow
	when modifying tags. This would cause distracting pauses when
	reading mail while notmuch would wait for Xapian when removing
	the "inbox" and "unread" tags from messages in a thread.

	GMime 2.4 or 2.6
	----------------
	GMime 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 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/

	zlib
	----

	zlib is an extremely popular compression library. It is used
	by Xapian, so if you installed that you will already have
	zlib. You may need to install the zlib headers separately.

	Notmuch needs the transparent write feature of zlib introduced
	in version 1.2.5.2 (Dec. 2011).

	zlib is available from http://zlib.net

Building Documentation
----------------------

To build the documentation for notmuch you need at least version 1.0
of sphinx (Jul. 2010).

Sphinx is available from www.sphinx-doc.org.

Installing Dependencies from Packages
-------------------------------------

On a modern, package-based operating system you can install all of the
dependencies with a simple simple command line. For example:

  For Debian and similar:

        sudo apt-get install libxapian-dev libgmime-2.6-dev libtalloc-dev zlib1g-dev python-sphinx

  For Fedora and similar:

	sudo yum install xapian-core-devel gmime-devel libtalloc-devel zlib-devel python-sphinx

On other systems, a similar command can be used, but the details of
the package names may be different.