[plug] Evolution from source

[Cameron Patrick]

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 02:00:40PM +1100, Onno Benschop wrote:

| I spent a *long* time looking for an email program to replace Eudora
| which I've used for close on a decade, and Evolution is it for the
| moment.
| 
| I don't want to download the .deb from apt-get.org, because I don't know
| who built it.
| 
| All I want is to know how I can:
|       * find the official source for Evolution v1.4.5
|       * compile and install it in such a way that it won't break my
|         Debian box
|       * have it installed in such a way that I can uninstall it when the
|         Debian package comes along.
| 
| Why is this so hard?

It's hard because it is.  But here's how I'd go about doing it[1]:

Add the unstable deb-src line into your sources.list - something like
	deb-src ftp://ftp.it.net.au/debian sid main non-free contrib

This will let you download unstable source packages (the latest of
which, last time I apt-get update'd, appears to be 1.4.5-3) without
having to grab anything else from unstable.  Then you'll need to
backport it yourself - which /hopefully/ shouldn't be too hard if
you're running testing.  Before you start, you'll need a few packages to
be able to build .deb files - at least devscripts, build-essential,
lintian and fakeroot.

First you can download and extract the source to evolution somewhere
in your home directory (doesn't need to be as root) -
	apt-get source evolution

The tricky bit is getting the build dependencies installed.  In theory,
this should be as simple as "apt-get build-dep evolution" but in
practice, because you're running testing and the evolution source you
want to build is from unstable, you'll probably have a few packages that
you'll /also/ need to backport in the same way as evolution.  (Evolution
seems to build-depend on newer versions of gtkhtml3.0, libgnome-pilot2-dev,
and libnss-dev than are in testing at the moment. That last one could be a
bugger, because it's from Mozilla...)  This will generally require fewer
new versions of packages than attempting to directly install something
from sid will.

Anyway, once you've got the build deps installed, actually building your
package should be as simple as
	$ cd evolution-1.4.5
	$ debuild

Debuild will spit out a bunch of .deb files in ../ which you can install
with dpkg (as root); you can go one step further and make them apt-able,
too.  The Debian Repository HOWTO explains how to do this:

	http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/repository-howto/repository-howto.html

Also: if you have gnupg installed (and a GPG private key) then debuild
will automatically sign your debs.  You probably don't care about this
if you're only using them for yourself, but signed debs is one way to
find out if they come from someone you at least marginally trust.
(apt-get doesn't verify the signatures yet, though ...)

Cheers,

Cameron.

[1] Actually it's not - I'd probably end up installing the deb from
unstable and hoping nothing breaks... :-)