Compiling a newer version than the latest .deb package

[Frank Watt]

On 4/06/19 1:24 AM, Dan Ritter wrote:
> Frank Watt wrote:
>>
>> |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
> 
> 
> 95% of your problems here will go away with:
> 
> sudo apt build-dep mutt
> 
> which will fetch and install all the libraries and tools
> necessary to build Debian's current version of mutt.

# sudo apt build-dep mutt
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to find a source package for mutt
Tui mutt-1.12.0 # which mutt
/usr/bin/mutt
Tui mutt-1.12.0 # dpkg -S /usr/bin/mutt
dpkg-query: no path found matching pattern /usr/bin/mutt

and:
 > apt build-dep thunderbird
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to find a source package for thunderbird

but:
 > which thunderbird
/usr/bin/thunderbird
 > dpkg -S /usr/bin/thunderbird
thunderbird: /usr/bin/thunderbird

What am I to infer from that?  Could that be because I'm not a Debian 
purist since I use Linux Mint?



> 
> However!
> 
> All of this may be unneeded, as Debian stable's mutt (which
> is neomutt right now, yes) has

I'm not familiar with neomutt.


> 
> set smtp_url = "smtp://user@smtp.domain:25"
> set smtp_pass="pass"
> set from="user at domain"
> set realname="username"
> 
> SMTP support.
> 
> However again!
> 
> Installing nullmailer will give you a sendmail substitute that only takes
> one line of config to do its job: send all mail to some other SMTP server.

Were I to install nullmailer, it would remove sendmail, but is that any 
use with a 9 year old mutt?  I find everything I need in it.  Would it 
work to reinstall the old mutt deb after replacing sendmail with 
nullmailer?  I get the impression that the deb configures the 
installation to use the mta present at the time.

Could it be as easy as that?
Thanks for all the suggestions I'm yet to try.

Frank