Re: Detecting curses...

[Hans-Bernhard Broeker]

On Tue, 18 Feb 2003, Richard Dawe wrote:

>     http://www.gnu.org/software/ac-archive/htmldoc/mp_with_curses.html

I saw that, but it doesn't solve the majority of problems you can have if
you try to use vendor-supplied curses libraries, outright broken ncurses
installations in funny places, color vs. non-color curses, curses
implementations using terminfo vs. ones that (still) rely on termcap, to
name just some of the more obvious obstacles.

I would really like to drop all this and tell people to spare me any bug
reports about any curses implementations except reasonably current ncurses
installed correctly, but I suspect I'm not in a position to do that.

> If macros aren't included in a future autoconf, perhaps you could
> consolidate all the current macros and submit them to an autoconf
> macro archive.

I personally can't, because I'm far from being an expert on curses, and I
don't really have the time to become one.  I think this really has to be
done as a collaborative effort by those who do know all those quirks and
crazinesses already, mainly because not every project maintainer has
access to a sufficient subset of platforms to find out about all of them
on their own and puzzle out the solution to each of them. And if they did,
that'd be a terrible waste of effort.

GNU has autoconf to cover quirks in compiler environments, automake to
cover limitations in Make, and libtool to cover differences in shared
library handling on different platforms.  IMHO, curses does need a similar
tool, and I think the GNU project is exactly the right institution to
organize its creation.

> There's also another autoconf macro archive at Sourceforge.

I'll search that one next.

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