[Users] Installing claws-mail from source ....

[Richard]

> Date: Sunday, August 23, 2020 14:02:42 +1200
> From: Rolf Turner <r.turner at auckland.ac.nz>
> 
> I recently joined the set of claws-mail users, and am basically very
> glad I did.  However my initial mode of installing claws-mail
> (under my Ubuntu OS) made use of "sudo apt-get install ...".  This
> seemed to work seamlessly, but gave me version 3.16.0, whereas the
> latest and greatest version appears to be 3.17.6 (so the repository
> used by apt-get is running a bit behind).
> 
> I think I will have a go at installing claw-mail from source.  The
> instructions given in the material obtained by cloning the
> claws-mail git repository seem pretty clear.
> 
> However I would like to seek counsel from younger and wiser heads
> before I plunge in.  Are there any disasters waiting to happen?
> What precautions should I take before attempting the installation?
> How difficult (or easy) will it be to back out if everything goes to
> custard?

You can get a tarball of the source for 3.17.6 from the link at: 

  <https://claws-mail.org/releases.php> 

I've found it fairly straight forward to compile from that (on
centos). Check the output from your run of ./configure to see if your
system is missing anything and proceed accordingly.

The default install is in /usr/local so you should be able to install
and test it separate from your repo installed version.