Detecting curses...

[Hans-Bernhard Broeker]

Hello, autoconf team,

I maintain a legacy project (the Unix source code browser cscope),
which uses curses.  Supporting all the different kinds of
vendor-supplied and publically available implementations of this has
proven to be a source of nightmares.

>From my understanding, streamlining such platform specifics is one of
the major goals of autoconf, so: is there any chance that there will be
a AC_CHECK_CURSES macro in a future version, which tells all the
important facts about the libcurses it found, including:

1) does it support colour?
2) does it use terminfo (so key code definitions are available)
3) what are its most serious bugs (like: OSF1 curses doesn't survive
   being put to the background via Ctrl-z).

Or is there at least a common-effort library of well-tested macros of 
this kind?  As it is now, macros of this kind seem to have spread
horizontally, by copy-pase from project to project, but not upwards into
the autoconf base.

-- 
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (address@hidden)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.