NCurses-5.0

[Chris Faylor]

On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 05:36:10PM -0400, Charles Wilson wrote:
>Earnie Boyd wrote:
>> I was hoping for that.  Charles Wilson is already distributing ncurses and
>> since he's already moving things in to maintain would probably be the one to
>> maintain it.  I received a personal note from him, thanking me for the install
>> fix.  
>
>I have no objections to maintaining it, but there are a few issues to
>work out first. I think it has external dependencies (gettext? readline?
>or was it the other way around...) and I'd like those to be dll-based
>for easy upgradability. Then there's that whole .dll.a versus _s.a
>issue. And binutils, gcc, ...

I wouldn't worry too much about external dependencies.  It might be
better to just get the library released and let people worry about where
to get the rest of the dependencies.  Unless that would put is in
violation of the GPL...

I don't have much of an opinion on the .dll.a versus _s.a stuff other
than the point that I made earlier that it is possible to have a .a file
that is both stub library and "static" library.

If this can be resolved soon, then we should wait.  Should we put it up
for a vote?  Or is cygwin-apps too new for this to be useful?

>OTOH, I can go ahead and release a basic ncurses (static only) right
>away using Earnie's patches, and then update & fix later. I just fear
>that will lead to a bunch of hard-to-upgrade packages being released
>that depend on ncurses, and are statically linked to this 'old' version.

Decisions, decisions.  How about waiting at least a week?

>Also, I seem to remember some discussion about 'SIGWINCH' on the list;
>should --enable-sigwinch be used when configuring ncurses? Also, I
>assume that --enable-symlinks should be used since otherwise, tic will
>try to use hardlinks which aren't supported.

I *think* that SIGWINCH should work.  And, your point about
--enable-symlinks is correct.  Hard links work on WNT but not on W9x.

cgf