Trying to compile Balsa on Mandrake

[Vaughn Treude]

On Mon, 2006-10-16 at 07:22, JD Austin wrote:
> Fore redhat I install both yum and apt to get out of dependency 
> nightmares pretty painlessly.
> I'm not sure of the mandrake repositories out there.
> The dag repository for redhat stays pretty up to date 
> :http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/
> Here's one set of yum repositories I found for mandrake: 
> http://speculation.org/garrick/yum.conf
> 
> JD
> 

JD,
Thanks for the feedback.  I have heard about yum, so I decided on your
suggestion to try it, and downloaded the latest version, yum 3.0. 
Unfortunately, it's a bit baffling.  To begin with, the INSTALL file was
not encouraging:

	For usage information, please see the README.
	
	run make
	run make install, if you're a masochist.

	you're better off making an rpm and installing it

If "make install" is so bad, why do they provide it?  And how should I
make this rpm?  And what will making the rpm accomplish?  I haven't a
clue!  OK, so I tried the "make install" anyway. It _seemed_ to work.
Running yum gives this message:

	There was a problem importing one of the Python modules
	required to run yum. The error leading to this problem was:

	   No module named yum

That's very interesting, since yum is what I allegedly just installed. 
Perhaps I don't have the right version of python (mine is 2.3.3) - seems
like the most likely explanation for this snafu but I don't see any
documentation in the yum source which tells me what version I need.

In the FAQ file, I found this interesting tidbit:

	If you are getting a message that yum itself is the missing module then
you probably  installed  it incorreclty (or installed the source rpm
using make/make install). If possible, find a prebuilt rpm that will
work for your system like one from Fedora or CentOS. Or, you can
download the srpm and do a

   rpmbuild --rebuild yum*.src.rpm

I didn't find any prebuild rpm's for my system, but I did see a source
RPM, which I downloaded, and I tried that rpmbuild.  It spews a lot of
messages, but I can't see that anything actually happened under
/usr/src/RPM, nor does yum work any differently than besfore.  Did the
previous operation actually modify the yum RPM I downloaded?  Not sure,
but I tried installing it, which produces a tarball in
/usr/src/RPM/SOURCES.  I unzipped and untarred this and now what? 
Another make and make install?  Why not?

Nothing's changed, though.

My conclusion:  I've never seen a more muddled and confusing and utterly
useuless installation on any open source product!

Vaughn



> Vaughn Treude wrote:
> > Hello everyone:
> >
> > I've got a Mandrake system I use for my day-to-day business.  I do not
> > want to upgrade it, as it generally works fine and I've _never_ had an
> > upgrade-type install succeed on Linux, ever (it has always hung the
> > system - and I've tried it on several machines at several times.)  My
> > Mandrake system's most annoying feature is that its email client
> > (Evolution 1.4.6) is buggy and has somehow gotten worse; I've let my
> > mail file get large and now it no longer allows me to empty the trash
> > folder. I wanted to try a newer version of Evolution, but they all have
> > too many dependencies; I can't even get the configure script to finish. 
> > Then I remembered someone mentioning Balsa, whose name implies "light
> > weight", so I thought, this should be easier.  I didn't have to add a
> > lot of libraries to get the configure script to run, but the stupid
> > thing won't compile, due to missing header files.  It started out with a
> > file that I found in one of the Debian *-dev source packages, which then
> > required another, and then another.  After downloading and installing at
> > least 20 of these packages, I finally come to a dead end: gtkhtml-dev. 
> > It has versions only for fink, maemo, and freebsd.  There's supposedly a
> > gtkhtml-devel package in the SuSE hierarchy but those links to that are
> > broken.  Does anybody know why a package like this would be impossible
> > to find with Google?   Or can anybody suggest a less painful alternative
> > email client?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Vaughn
> >
> >
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