Thunderbird 3 on Sid PPC, or "Building a debian package when someone has already done the work for you"

I recently wanted to try thunderbird 3 / icedove 3 on debian. I have a powerpc, and there is no one currently building for that architecture.

Download packages from here
http://pkg-mozext.alioth.debian.org/packages/sid/source/

get the icedovexxxx.diff.gz, the icedovexxxx.orig.tar.gz and the icedovexxxx.dsc

put in a folder on your computer

cd there

dpkg-source -x icedovexxxx.dsc
(this is unpacking tarball, and applying diff, creating dirs etc..)

cd into resulting directory (you want to be in the dir with the debian directory)

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
(this should build the package, but will first whine about all the dependencies you don't have)

install them with:

apt-get install build-essentials (plus the list of 20 things the above command complained about)

then try again
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

It will take a long time to compile.....

You should get a deb package at the end which you can install with. It will be created in the directory above this one.

cd ..

dpkg -i icedovexxxxxx.deb icedove-gnome-supportxxxxxxxxxxxxx.deb

run it!