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. notmuch.el installation ----------------------- Installing the notmuch.el emacs lisp function systemwide: sudo make install-emacs Each user needs to add (require 'notmuch) in his ~/.emacs to activate it. 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 After installing Xapian, please ensure that you have a command named "xapian-config" on your $PATH as notmuch expects. (At least one notmuch user found that Xapian installed the config program to /usr/local/bin/xapian-config-1.1 ). 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").