Compiling a newer version than the latest .deb package

[Frank Watt]

Ken Moffat wrote:

|Hi Frank,
|
| I assume you probably won't get this mail (gmail dislikes my mails
|from this address), but just in case ...
|

At least it got to the archives.


|[...]
|> p   lib32ncurses5                                 - shared libraries for
|> terminal handling (32-bit)
|> p   lib32ncurses5-dev                             - developer's libraries
|> for ncurses (32-bit)
|> p   lib32ncursesw5                                - shared libraries for
|> terminal handling (wide character
|> p   lib32ncursesw5-dev                            - developer's libraries
|> for ncursesw (32-bit)
|> p   lib64ncurses5:i386                            - shared libraries for
|
|You seem to be on x86_64 (or amd64 as debian calls it), so unless
|you are building as 32-bit you don't need any of these.
|
|The -dev versions include headers, so you need those to compile, the
|more-basic versions are only the libraries (for packages provided by
|debian). And 'ncurses5' is the old version for ASCII or ISO-8859-N
|versions - these days, 'ncurses5w' is probably what you need
|(it supports unicode).  So:
|
|> terminal handling (64-bit)
|> p   lib64ncurses5-dev:i386                        - developer's libraries
|> for ncurses (64-bit)
|
|?i386?  Maybe some weird naming convention in debian.  That is
|probably the right *old* (non-wide) 64-bit version.
|
|But I don't see any lib64ncursesw5 (wide 64-bit) version in what you
|listed, and I imagine that is what you need for 64-bit builds with
|unicode.

Despite the confusing name,
aptitude install lib64ncurses5-dev:i386

got past the curses error message.  But then I got this:

checking tcbdb.h usability... no
checking tcbdb.h presence... no
checking for tcbdb.h... no
checking villa.h usability... no
checking villa.h presence... no
checking for villa.h... no
checking for vlopen in -lqdbm... no
checking for gdbm_open... no
checking for BerkeleyDB > 4.0... no
checking for mdb_env_create... no
checking kclangc.h usability... no
checking kclangc.h presence... no
checking for kclangc.h... no
configure: error: You need Tokyo Cabinet, Kyoto Cabinet, QDBM, GDBM, 
LMDB or Berkeley DB4 for hcache

So I tried pasting that message into duckduckgo which came up first
with https://thomer.com/howtos/mutt_on_mac.html

The end of that page finishes:

  The key to making the configure errors go away is including CPPFLAGS
  and LDFLAGS on the command line when configuring mutt.

$ CPPFLAGS=-I/opt/local/include/ LDFLAGS=-L/opt/local/lib/ ./configure ...

I'd never thought of Mac users using mutt, but is there any way I
could use that suggestion?  I've had limited experience compiling
source code but there are others much simpler to do than this one.
Maybe it's tricky even for Debian geeks and that's why the .deb files
are so old.

|And at the risk of trying to teach my granny to such eggs, the
|following glyphs (variants of 'a' with diacritical) should be in
|unicode, so if you can read these then you _do_ need wide ncurses:
|áâà ąă

I don't know how to use these, but it looks like I can read them.

Thank you Ken for getting me this far.

Cheers
Frank