Compiling Wanderlust for Windows and use it for Gmail.

Question

I'm trying to get Wanderlust working in Windows to connect to Gmail. Compiling the code is much more painful than expected. Here are the barriers so far:

1. Can't download dependent packages: SEMI, APEL, and FLIM. I eventually found newer versions, but I'm not sure they will work. Anyone have the older versions?
2. Needs make and install. I used MSYS and it seems to have compiled okay.
3. SSL support. I was getting a "Cannot open load file: ssl" error. I found an ssl.el that comes with w3. So installed w3.
4. Bash command in ssl.el: ssl-get-command is running something from /bin/sh (not a directory I have in Windows). I really don't want to refactor this code. Is there a better way?

Others speak very highly of Wanderlust, so I want to give it a try. I feel like I'm almost there, but am pretty much worn out with all the crazy configuration I have to do. Does anyone have this working on Windows? I'm pretty sure it will work with Gmail, because of this post. But will it work in Windows too? If you have a few pointers, please help.

Answer 1

I recently installed wl on a linux host, and had the same issue with not being able to locate the dependencies as specified. However, I, like you, found the 'more recent versions' and used them. They did indeed work fine, so unless those new versions have added any incompatibility with windows, they shouldn't present any problem.

The error you're receiving is because it's not finding the 'install' utility, which is part of GNU coreutils. Autotools (and it's family) depend on install being able to work, so if you want to continue with the cygwin method, then installing autotools should bring in the install program.

(I have no idea if wl will compile/work using cygwin otherwise, though.)

Answer 2

Using the wl configuration here:

http://box.matto.nl/emacsgmail.html

After adding ssl.el from here:

http://quimby.gnus.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/gnus/contrib/ssl.el

I am able to get wanderlust talking just fine to gmail on a linux configuration of wanderlust, and since the ssl.el file there isn't really system-dependent (although it does require the openssl command-line tools), I don't see that there should be any problem with it working on msys.

The 'cannot open load file: ssl' error is exactly what I ran into until I installed that ssl.el file too :)

Edit; Just in case you have trouble finding it, the MSYS port of openssl you'll want is here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/MSYS%20openssl/

[posted as a new answer since I think you'll get a notification that way :)]