The following prerequisites are described in broad terms and not as specific package names (which will depend on the exact platform). The dependencies should be available as packages on most common Unix derivatives, and it should be quite uncommon that you would have to build one of them.
If you do not need the GUI, you can avoid all GUI dependencies by disabling its build. (See the configure section further).
The shopping list:
If you start from git code, you will need the autoconf, automake and libtool triad. They are not needed for building from tar distributions.
C++ compiler. Recent versions require C++11 compatibility (1.23 and later).
bison command (for Recoll 1.21 and later).
For building the documentation: the xsltproc command, and the Docbook XML and style sheet files. You can avoid this dependency by disabling documentation building with the
--disable-userdoc
configure option.Development files for Xapian core.
Important
If you are building Xapian for an older CPU (before Pentium 4 or Athlon 64), you need to add the
--disable-sse
flag to the configure command. Else all Xapian application will crash with anillegal instruction
error.Development files for Qt 5 . and its own dependencies (X11 etc.)
Development files for libxslt
Development files for zlib.
Development files for Python (or use
--disable-python-module
).Development files for libchm
You may also need libiconv. On Linux systems, the iconv interface is part of libc and you should not need to do anything special.
Check the Recoll download page for up to date version information.