Trying to build balsa == huge pain in the ???

[Jim Meyer <purp selequa com>]

Hi.

I hate the Netscape Mail Client. I want to try balsa.

I've been trying to get a successful build of balsa for about a week
now. The first stab I took was by getting the 0.4.6 source from
www.balsa.net; at that point, I had all the RPMs from the
gnome-1.0/redhat directory installed and got both a GTK test error and a
"libPropList not installed" error.

I grabbed the tarball of libPropList and installed it into
/usr/local/lib; meanwhile, I discovered an option that would allow me to
skip the GTK test in configure -- I already knew I had v1.2.0. Still no
luck.

Then, just for the change of scenery, I grabbed gtk+ from the CVS.
Trying that build was, well, weird. I chalked that up to lacking some
key bits, so I grabbed all the packages listed on the Gnome website as
minimal, plus a couple that caught my eye. =] The list of gnome packages
I've gotten from the CVS is:

  balsa libPropList gnome-pilot gnome-perl gnomoney pilot-link think 
  glib imlib ORBit gnome-libs gnome-core

Back to building, I find I must upgrade automake and autoconf. Did that
and removed the old versions (which came from RPMs). I build and install
libPropTool, then figure I'll go build gtk+ -- seems like it'd be nice
to pass the GTK test in balsa rather than skipping it. I've run
autogen.sh and it completes fine; however, GTK+ build fails:

root@rabbit:/usr/src/gnome/gtk+ [23:29] <321# make
make: *** No rule to make target `@MAINTAINER_MODE_TRUE@', needed by
`Makefile.in'.  Stop.

Okay, fine. I'll just use --disable-gtktest and figure that the option
wouldn't be there if someone else hadn't had similar problems. So I go
back to balsa, having installed libPropList /usr/local/lib which is in
my LD_LIBRARY_PATH. balsa says:

root@rabbit:/usr/src/gnome/balsa [23:32] <326# ./autogen.sh
--disable-gtktest
[...]
checking for PLGetProplistWithPath in -lPropList... no
configure: error: *** libPropList not found.  Please check
http://www.balsa.net for information on the required files.

At this point, I'm ready to surrender and either live with Netscape or
revert to an xterm with Pine or something. I thought I'd give it one
last shot, though, so here I am.

Question 1: what am I doing wrong?

Question 2: why isn't there an RPM for dolts like me who can't figure
out the answer to question 1?

Question 3: if I go off and learn how to build just such an RPM, who do
I send it to so that other folks don't have to go through this and/or
don't just chuck it instead of getting to actually try balsa?

Sorry to have gone so long; I wanted to quash most of the RTFM-like
answers in favor of real solutions.

Thanks!

--j
-- 
Jim Meyer                                                    
purp@selequa.com
 
open(perlLinx,"http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Perl/");

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