Ron Johnson posted on Fri, 23 Sep 2011 19:04:58 -0500 as excerpted:
$ git clone git://github.com/judgefudge/pan2
@ Ron J:
Umm...
You just told someone running Ubuntu, who asked how to install an
official release version, to install not the official gnome git version,
not even the official khaley/lostcoder pan upstream on github, but a
rather bleeding edge experimental version by someone else in the
community.
This despite NO indication at all that the user even WANTS anything other
than official stable, and WITHOUT any warning of ANY kind that he's not
getting official stable.
Now he may indeed want the latest and the greatest leading edge
experimental version. I run it. Others here run it. There are lots of
really very nice but still experimental features in it that aren't in the
official version.
But PLEASE, recognize that you DO have a responsibility to SOME sort of
truth in advertising, and at LEAST tell people what you're suggesting
they use and why, if you're going to suggest anything other than the
official tarballs and/or distro versions.
@ Evan M:
Thanks for asking. I don't run Ubuntu myself (I'm a Gentooer) so may not
be as helpful on the distro-specific details as some. However, here's
your choices.
1. Distro or distro-upstream (Debian, for you) package. I don't know
what version Ubuntu ships, but 10.04 was likely still 0.133. However,
it's likely that one or more of the other Debian based distros have
either 0.134 or 0.135. That will probably be easiest for you as it
should integrate with your package management system and therefore
automate some of the dependency issues, etc, that you might otherwise
have.
2. Official version sources, either the tarball, or from the official
gnome git repo. The following page gives some general help:
http://pan.rebelbase.com/download/
Specifically, note the requirements for the gtk2 and gmime header files,
packaged as gtk2-devel and gmime-devel on most binary distros. Also,
gnome-common, tho I'm not sure if the tarball requires it or not, but if
you do the git version, you'll certainly need it as it contains a
component referenced by the ./autogen.sh mentioned on the above page.
In general, binary distros split most upstream libraries packages in
half, into a runtime package containing the library binary and anything
else needed to run pre-built apps that link to it, and a -devel package
containing the header files and other data necessary if you're going to
build packages depending on that library from sources. So any time you
build a package from source, expect that even if you already have the
necessary libraries installed, you'll probably still need to install the
-devel packages for them, so the build process can build and link against
them.
3. Official community upstream development git repo, by khaley, aka
lostcoder, on github. (This is also mentioned on the download page
linked above.)
Pan's development process is a bit complicated. Essentially, the job of
lead developer is split in half between two people, neither one of which
is interested in doing the whole thing. K Haley is the community lead
developer, who actually merges patches, both his own and those submitted
by others, into the code as originally inherited from pan's previous lead
developer, Charles Kerr. But KHaley for whatever reason hasn't expressed
any interest at all in doing the upstream gnome thing. Petr Kovar,
meanwhile, was already a gnome translator and general documentation guy,
thus already had gnome access, when he joined the pan team, but he
doesn't really do any coding. But put the two together (along with me as
the senior list regular; I'm not a coder either and otherwise tend more
toward kde than gnome, but I've been interested in pan and on the pan
lists for nearing a decade now, with my contribution generally being
longer detail posts such as this) and you have a working team. =:^)
So PKovar basically takes KHaley's code with very little changes of his
own, and lands it in the official gnome repo. Thus, khaley's lostcoder
github repo is the community upstream and very close to what the gnome
repo gets, which in turn ultimately gets rolled into an official release
tarball.
The khaley git URL is mentioned on that download page. You can run
either the main/master branch, or if you want something a bit more edgy,
consider the testing branch. But khaley is still quite conservative, so
even his testing branch is pretty safe.
4,5. Community alternative repos. There are actually a couple of these,
both on github.
4. JLynch (aexoden on github) has had some patches merged into khaley's
repo but doesn't seem to read this list, so I don't believe many here
know much about his goals with this repo. I just know about it from
looking on github for people with a pan2 repo.
5. Heinrich Mueller, aka judgefudge on github (former github ID
imhotep82), is by contrast QUITE active and responsive on this list, and
his repo is where most of the new and exciting activity seems to be
taking place. He has implemented quite a number of new features in his
repo including binary attachment uploading (planned for a decade or more
but never actually implemented until months ago; it's still somewhat
experimental, but works), automatic actions based on score (delete and
mark-read, intended for ignored/negative scores, cache or download-and-
save, intended for high scores, again, this has been heavily requested
for years but only very recently implemented by hmueller, and the feature
remains somewhat experimental), and some minor ones, plus a few bug fixes
that haven't made it into the official version yet, AFAIK.
Of course, the git link and brief instructions Ron J provided was to this
repo. As I've explained, he's quite active and responsive on this list
(which I read thru gmane.org as a newsgroup, BTW) and that's where the
exciting new activity seems to be happening, so it's a very good choice
if you want the latest experimental features and is what many list
regulars use now, but if you're a bit more conservative, you may well
prefer either khaley's recognized upstream version, or may even prefer
sticking with either official gnome git or the release tarballs, and it's
your machine and your choice, so don't be afraid to assert it, based on
what you're most comfortable with. =:^)