doc: lei blob: wording fixups, describe --remote

[public-inbox.git] / INSTALL

diff --git a/INSTALL b/INSTALL
index 45829a80eaef552c62dcba6a2fde5c29baffab9a..eb939a59d596c0f20e7f03f931791b4337b9dee5 100644 (file)
--- a/INSTALL
+++ b/INSTALL
@@ -5,13 +5,18 @@ This is for folks who want to setup their own public-inbox instance.
 Clients should use normal git-clone/git-fetch, IMAP or NNTP clients
 if they want to import mail into their personal inboxes.
 
+As of 2021, public-inbox is packaged by several OS distributions,
+listed in alphabetical order: Debian, GNU Guix, NixOS, and Void Linux.
+
 public-inbox is developed on Debian GNU/Linux systems and will
 never depend on packages outside of the "main" component of
 the "stable" distribution, currently Debian 10.x ("buster"),
 but older versions of Debian remain supported.
 
 Most packages are available in other GNU/Linux distributions
-and FreeBSD.
+and FreeBSD.  CentOS 7.x users will likely want newer git and
+Xapian packages for better performance and v2 inbox support:
+https://public-inbox.org/meta/20210421151308.yz5hzkgm75klunpe@nitro.local/
 
 TODO: this still needs to be documented better,
 also see the scripts/ and sa_config/ directories in the source tree
@@ -31,9 +36,9 @@ To accept incoming mail into a public inbox, you'll likely want:
 * MTA - postfix is recommended (for public-inbox-mda)
 * SpamAssassin (spamc/spamd)   (for public-inbox-watch/public-inbox-mda)
 
-Beyond that, there is one non-standard Perl module required:
+Beyond that, there is one non-standard Perl package required:
 
-* URI::Escape                      deb: liburi-perl
+* URI                              deb: liburi-perl
                                    pkg: p5-URI
                                    rpm: perl-URI
                                    (for HTML/Atom generation)
@@ -152,16 +157,27 @@ install the system (into /usr/local) with:
         make test    # see HACKING for faster tests for hackers
         make install # root permissions may be needed
 
-When installing Search::Xapian, make sure the underlying Xapian
-installation is not affected by an index corruption bug:
+symlink-install (public-inbox.git and 1.7.0+)
+---------------------------------------------
 
-        https://bugs.debian.org/808610
+For users who lack permissions and/or wish to minimize their
+installation footprint, the "symlink-install" target is available in
+public-inbox.git.  The following installs symlinks to $HOME/bin
+pointing to the source tree:
+
+       perl Makefile.PL
+       make symlink-install prefix=$HOME
 
-For Debian 8.x (jessie), this means using Debian 8.5 or later.
+Other installation notes
+------------------------
+
+Debian 8.x (jessie) users, use Debian 8.5 or later if using Xapian:
+        https://bugs.debian.org/808610
 
-public-inbox will never store unregeneratable data in Xapian
-or any other search database we might use; Xapian corruption
-will not destroy critical data.
+public-inbox-* commands will never store unregeneratable data in
+Xapian nor any other search database we might use; Xapian
+corruption will not destroy critical data.  Note: `lei' DOES store
+unregeneratable data in Xapian and SQLite.
 
 See the public-inbox-overview(7) man page for the next steps once
 the installation is complete.
@@ -176,6 +192,7 @@ RPM-based distros split them out into separate packages:
 * Encode                           rpm: perl-Encode
 * IO::Compress                     rpm: perl-IO-Compress
 * Storable                         rpm: perl-Storable
+* Text::ParseWords                 rpm: perl-Text-Parsewords
 
 Copyright
 ---------