Installing mew (editing Makefile.in)

[ken <gebser@speakeasy.net>]

Ryo wrote:
> Bill White wrote:
>> Are there any emacs-based MUAs that handle smtp authentication more or
>> less "out of the box" with the setting of a few clearly-documented
>> variables?  If so, can you point me to the documentation?
> 
> Has somebody mentioned "mew"? (http://www.mew.org/ )
> I think it does everything "out of the box", including
> SMTP on SSL with or without authentication for sending email;
> and IMAP and POP on SSL for receiving email.  For example,
> 
> http://www.mew.org/release/info/mew_78.html.en#SEC78
> 
> How much of the functionality works "out of the box" debends
> on how your "box" is configured "out of the box". :-)  I've
> been using mew for a long time.  I remember that switching from
> plain SMTP to authenticated SMTP required only a couple
> of lines in mew's configuration file, ~/.mew.el  .

Thanks very much, Ryo.  I hope mew works.  I've just downloaded and
untarred mew-5.1 and know I need to edit the values of some variables in
Makefile.in:

prefix=@prefix@
exec_prefix=@exec_prefix@
libdir=@libdir@
datadir=@datadir@
infodir=@infodir@

These are very much standard variables; I've installed emacs from a
tarball several times before and it's always been a guessing game,
trying to figure out what the values of these should be.  This guessing
game is complicated a bit more this time because mew is to work with an
installation of emacs which was installed, not for the entire
machine/system, but just for one user.  I.e., emacs v.22.0.50.1 was
installed under a user's $HOME just for the use of this one user.  The
emacs executable is still in $HOME/linux/tarballs/emacs/src/ where the
emacs install put it; it's run by means of an alias.

The questions I have are simply this: how do one determine the values
for the above Makefile.in variables?  While it's never a good idea to
guess what a value should be based on the variable name (for, as
programmers know, a variable name can be anything the programmer wants),
there's little or no other information to go on.  So-- guessing-- I
could well imagine that

infodir=$HOME/linux/tarballs/emacs/info/

though it's another guess whether the trailing slash (/) is necessary or
an error or developer- or OS- or machine-dependent.  So this becomes two
questions.

Guessing again by the variable name, I'm imagining that "exec-prefix"
means "where the 'emacs' executable is located," and so that for my
particular installation it would be

exec_prefix=$HOME/linux/tarballs/emacs/src/

But without documentation which might explain if exec_prefix is looking
for a particular file or set of files, or the purpose or reasoning
behind using it, it's really impossible to know.

The other above-mentioned variable names are quite vague, so much so
that even imagination fails to come up with likely value candidates.  So
if someone knows how to determine what values these variables should
have, it would be much appreciated.

prefix=
exec_prefix=
libdir=
datadir=
infodir=


Thanks.


-- 
One is not superior merely because one
sees the world as odious.
                -- Chateaubriand (1768-1848)