meli/BUILD.md

Build meli

For a quick start, build and install locally:

PREFIX=~/.local make install

Available subcommands for make are listed with make help. The Makefile should be POSIX portable and not require a specific make version.

meli requires rust version 1.70.0 or later and rust's package manager, Cargo. Information on how to get it on your system can be found here: https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/getting-started/installation.html

With Cargo available, the project can be built with make and the resulting binary will then be found under target/release/meli. Run make install to install the binary and man pages. This requires root, so I suggest you override the default paths and install it in your $HOME: make PREFIX=${HOME}/.local install.

You can build and run meli with one command: cargo run --release.

Build features

Some functionality is held behind "feature gates", or compile-time flags. The following list explains each feature's purpose:

• gpgme enables GPG support via libgpgme (on by default)
• dbus-notifications enables showing notifications using dbus (on by default)
• notmuch provides support for using a notmuch database as a mail backend (on by default)
• jmap provides support for connecting to a jmap server and use it as a mail backend (on by default)
• sqlite3 provides support for builting fast search indexes in local sqlite3 databases (on by default)
• cli-docs includes the manpage documentation compiled by either mandoc or man binary to plain text in meli's command line. Embedded documentation can be viewed with the subcommand meli man [PAGE] (on by default).
• regexp provides experimental support for theming some e-mail fields based on regular expressions. It uses the pcre2 library. Since it's actual use in the code is very limited, it is not recommended to use this (off by default).
• static and *-static bundle C libraries in dependencies so that you don't need them installed in your system (on by default).

Though not a feature, the presence of the environment variable UNICODE_REGENERATE_TABLES in compile-time of the melib crate will force the regeneration of unicode tables. Otherwise the tables are included with the source code, and there's no real reason to regenerate them unless you intend to modify the code or update to a new Unicode version.

Build Debian package (deb)

Building with Debian's packaged cargo might require the installation of these two packages: librust-openssl-sys-dev librust-libdbus-sys-dev

A *.deb package can be built with make deb-dist

Using notmuch

To use the optional notmuch backend feature, you must have libnotmuch5 installed in your system. In Debian-like systems, install the libnotmuch5 packages. meli detects the library's presence on runtime. If it is not detected, you can use the library_file_path setting on your notmuch account to specify the absolute path of the library.

Using GPG

To use the optional gpg feature, you must have libgpgme installed in your system. In Debian-like systems, install the libgpgme11 package. meli detects the library's presence on runtime.

Development

Development builds can be built and/or run with

cargo build
cargo run

There is a debug/tracing log feature that can be enabled by using the flag --feature debug-tracing after uncommenting the features in Cargo.toml. The logs are printed in stderr when the env var MELI_DEBUG_STDERR is defined, thus you can run meli with a redirection (i.e 2> log).

To trace network and protocol communications you can enable the following features:

• imap-trace
• jmap-trace
• nntp-trace
• smtp-trace