Debian package for Mutt with NNTP patch

Introduction

Did you ever wanted Mutt with NNTP support packed up for your Debian (or Debian-ish) box, but you are too lazy to do it yourself? Did you even tried to report a bug so the patch can be applied to the official Debian package but the maintainers told you they wont do it?

If so, this is a great day for you, because I did it and I’m giving it away with no charge in this one time only opportunity!!! =P

Seriously, I can understand why the maintainers don’t want to support it officially, it a big patch and can be some work to fold it in. So I did it myself, and it turned out it’s wasn’t that bad.

I adjusted the patch maintained by Vsevolod Volkov to work on top of all the other patches included in the mutt-patched Debian package (the only conflicting patch is the sidebar patch and some files that doesn’t exist because the patch should be applied after autotools files are generated and Debian apply the patches before that) and built a new package, mutt-nntp using the latest (at the time of writing) Debian source.

Compiling/Installing

You can find the latest source and the binary packages for Ubuntu 12.04 Precise (i386 and amd64) here. You can find there the modified NNTP patch too.

If you have other Ubuntu, Debian, other Debian based distribution or another architecture, you can compile the binary package by downloading the files mutt_x.y.z-NnntpM.diff.gz and mutt_x.y.z-NnntpM.dsc 1 from here, and mutt_x.y.z.orig.tar.gz from the Debian mutt source package page (see the links at the right), then run (where x.y.z is the Mutt version, N is the Debian package revision, M is my package revision and ARCH is your architecture):

ver=1.5.21
deb_ver=$ver-5nntp2
url=https://llucax.com.nyud.net/proj/mutt-nntp-debian/files/latest
wget $url/mutt_$deb_ver.dsc $url/mutt_$deb_ver.diff.gz \
   http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/m/mutt/mutt_$ver.orig.tar.gz
sudo apt-get build-dep mutt
dpkg-source -x mutt_$deb_ver.dsc
cd mutt-$ver
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
# install any missing packages reported by dpkg-buildpackage and try again
cd ..
sudo dpkg -i mutt-nntp_${deb_ver}_*.deb

Now you can enjoy reading your favourite newsgroups and your favourite mailing lists via Gmane with Mutt without leaving the beauty of your packaging system. No need to thank me, I’m glad to be helpful (but if you want to make a donation, just let me know ;).

Note

You should always install the same mutt version as the one the mutt-nntp is based on (i.e. the version number without the nntpX suffix, for example if mutt-nntp version is 1.5.21-5nntp1, your mutt version should be 1.5.21-5 or 1.5.21-5ubuntu2). A newer version will satisfy the dependency too but it is not guaranteed to work (even when it probably will, specially if the upstream version is the same). You could also install the generated/provided mutt package, but that might be problematic when upgrading your distribution.

News

If you want to keep up with the updates, I usually post new releases in my blog. You can subscribe to the mutt tag feed if you want to receive any news (or random thoughts related to Mutt) or to all mutt + nntp + release tags feed if you only want to be notified of new releases.

Repository

You can find a clone from the official Mutt Debian Package git repository, with my extra changes to add and enable the NNTP patch in my git repository (you probably want to see the nntp branch). To build the latest package from the repository, you can just do:

git clone https://git.llucax.com/r/software/mutt-debian.git
cd mutt-debian
git checkout nntp # or a particular "nntp/*" tag
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -i.git -I.git

Release History

2012-07-05

Version 1.5.21-5nntp3 released (release notes).

2012-07-04

Version 1.5.21-5nntp2 released (release notes).

2011-05-24

Version 1.5.21-5nntp1 released (release notes).

2011-04-12

Version 1.5.21-4nntp1 released (release notes).

2011-01-19

Version 1.5.21-2nntp1 released (release notes).

2010-06-06

Version 1.5.20-8luca1 released (release notes).

2010-02-22

Version 1.5.20-7luca1 released.

2009-10-14

Version 1.5.20-4luca1 released.

1

Please note that In previous versiones I used the naming scheme NlucaM instead of NnntpM.