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 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 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 --------- 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 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-2.4-dev libtalloc-dev For Fedora and similar: sudo yum install xapian-core-devel gmime-devel libtalloc-devel On other systems, a similar command can be used, but the details of the package names may be different.