notmuch/INSTALL

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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 3.0,
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 https://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
-----
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 https://github.com/jstedfast/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 https://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 https://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.
To install the documentation as "info" pages, you will need the
additional tools makeinfo and install-info.
Installing Dependencies from Packages
-------------------------------------
On a modern, package-based operating system you can install all of the
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dependencies with a single simple command line. For example:
For Debian and similar:
sudo apt-get install libxapian-dev libgmime-3.0-dev libtalloc-dev zlib1g-dev python3-sphinx texinfo install-info
For Fedora and similar:
sudo dnf install xapian-core-devel gmime30-devel libtalloc-devel zlib-devel python3-sphinx texinfo info
On other systems, a similar command can be used, but the details of
the package names may be different.