mail-notification, apt-build

A nice little discovery for the day was apt-build. I've never had cause to use it before but due to some incompatibilities with the GPL (under which mail-notification is licensed) and OpenSSL encryption support has been intentionally disabled in the package for mail-notification.

I need SSL support for checking my email and after doing some very quick reading somebody suggested apt-build. This did the job very quickly. I used apt-build build mail-notification and then edited debian/rules to comment out the --disable-ssl line before finally running apt-build install mail-notification to compile and install mail-notification with SSL support. For some reason the actualy install didn't work but a quick dpkg -i on the resulting package did the trick.

Not as customisable as FreeBSD's ports or Gentoo's ebuilds, but a very neat feature that shows the designers of apt really thought things through.

Now I receive great notifications when I receive new email: