Those loveable finks
My last attempt to rebuild my mail client of choice on the old Powerbook was something short of thrilling. It was with some trepidation that I moved my data to the new MacBook and attempted to fire up kmail. Thanks to the magic of rosetta, it worked. I was, in a word, stunned.
But I just can't leave well enough alone. Having read encouraging notes about fink on 10.4+Intel, I backed up my data and /sw directory plunged in, foolishness first.
Unlike my previous attempt at building KMail, the process was absolutely painless. Not only is the "ssl vs. non-ssl" war apparently over, dependencies satisfied themselves in the right order and the only input needed from me was the occasional mirror selection. An hour into the process things were well enough under way that I went to bed and just left the build running. When I came back to the terminal this morning, lo-and-behold, it had built cleanly. On firing it up, i can attest to the difference that native compilation makes. My mail has never been so speedy. As someone who lives-and-dies by the mailing traffic that flows into my laptop, all of this makes me one extra-happy camper.
The fink folks (particularly Benjamin Reed, the KDE maintainer) have clearly spent some quality time polishing the dependency code since last I had to preform this operation. My sincerest thanks go to them for the painless install this go 'round. Not only do I have the latest-and-greatest KDE available, I now feel comfortable recommending fink again to folks who want a better alternative to Mail.app.