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

[Rolf Turner]

Thanks very much for this.  Please see in-line below.

On Sun, 23 Aug 2020 02:48:51 +0000
Richard <lists-claws at listmail.innovate.net> wrote:

> > 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> 

Is it better to use this than to use the source that one can obtain via
Git?  Or is there any real difference.

> 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.

Good advice.  I'll do that.
 
> The default install is in /usr/local so you should be able to install
> and test it separate from your repo installed version.

That's good to know.  But could this result in conflicts in respect of
the files in ~/.claws-mail?

Thanks again.

cheers,

Rolf Turner

-- 
Honorary Research Fellow
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276