I made two tiny patches to enable notmuch to be built on the Hurd, the first one is straight forward, it just adds GNU as a platform and reuses the settings for Linux. The second one deals with the problem that the value passed as an argument to --build is not a triple but a tuple: % dpkg-architecture -qDEB_HOST_GNU_TYPE i486-gnu notmuchs configure script expects the arguments for --host and --build to be triple but autotools is much more forgiving here. It does so by canonicalizing the values using some serious voodoo in /usr/share/misc/config.sub. The patch reuses config.sub to canonicalize the arguments, but this introduces a build dependency on autotools and probably worse, it uses autotools internals and the path to config.sub has to be hardcoded. Since this might be not desirable we might also just drop the code that parses the --host and --build options since we're not using them anyway. With these two patches notmuch builds fine and works on the Hurd, the testsuite is running fine (modulo one test, but that might be broken, haven't checked on linux) and the python bindings are fine too (I've been successfully running afew to tag some mails). Cheers, Justus