--- /dev/null
+Build and install instructions for Notmuch.
+
+Compilation commands
+--------------------
+The process for compiling and installing Notmuch is the very standard
+sequence of:
+
+ ./configure
+ make
+ sudo make install
+
+You can even skip the configure step if all of the dependencies of
+Notmuch are satisfied. If they are not, the configure script will
+notice that and provide instructions on where to obtain the necessary
+dependencies.
+
+Dependencies
+------------
+Notmuch depends on three libraries: Xapian, GMime 2.4, and Talloc
+which are each described below:
+
+ Xapian
+ ------
+ Xapian is the search-engine library underlying Notmuch.
+
+ It provides all the real machinery of indexing and searching,
+ (including the very nice parsing of the query string).
+
+ Xapian is available from http://xapian.org
+
+ GMime 2.4
+ ---------
+ GMime 2.4 provides decoding of MIME email messages for Notmuch.
+
+ Without GMime, Notmuch would not be able to extract and index
+ the actual text from email message encoded as BASE64, etc.
+
+ GMime 2.4 is available from http://spruce.sourceforge.net/gmime/
+
+ Talloc
+ ------
+ Talloc is a memory-pool allocator used by Notmuch.
+
+ Talloc is an extremely lightweight and easy-to-use tool for
+ allocating memory in a hierarchical fashion and then freeing
+ it with a single call of the top-level handle. Using it has
+ made development of Notmuch much easier and much less prone to
+ memory leaks.
+
+ Talloc is available from http://talloc.samba.org/
+
+On a modern, package-based operating system such as Debian, you can
+install all of the dependencies with the following simple command
+line:
+
+ sudo apt-get install libxapian-dev libgmime-2.4-dev libtalloc-dev
+
+On other systems, a similar command can be used, but the details of
+the package names may be different, (such as "devel" in place of
+"dev").
+
+
+
+