Building ncurses-5.7 on Mac OS X: workaround and installation bug fix

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

I recently built ncurses-5.7 on Mac OS X 10.5 PowerPC

        % sw_vers
        ProductName:    Mac OS X
        ProductVersion: 10.5.6
        BuildVersion:   9G55

        % uname -a
        Darwin XXXX.math.utah.edu 9.6.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.6.0:
        Mon Nov 24 17:39:01 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.9.59~1/RELEASE_PPC
        Power Macintosh powerpc PowerMac3,6 Darwin

The build required manual patches of Makefiles after the configure
run, with changes like this:

105 XXXX:ncurses-5.7 % foreach f (./c++/Makefile ./ncurses/Makefile 
./progs/Makefile ./test/Makefile)
foreach? echo ========= $f
foreach? diff $f.~1~ $f
foreach? end
========= ./c++/Makefile
114a115
> TEST_ARGS     = -L../lib -lform -lmenu -lpanel -lncurses  -dynamic
========= ./ncurses/Makefile
157a158
> TEST_ARGS     = -L../lib -lform -lmenu -lpanel -lncurses  -dynamic
========= ./progs/Makefile
112a113
> LIBS_TIC      = -L../lib -lncurses -L../lib -lncurses -dynamic
115a117
> LIBS_TINFO    = -L../lib -lncurses -dynamic
========= ./test/Makefile
91a92
> TEST_ARGS     = -L../lib -lform -lmenu -lpanel -lncurses  -dynamic
106a108
> LIBS_TINFO    =  -L../lib -lncurses -dynamic  $(TEST_LIBS) $(MATH_LIB)

This system refuses to link with -static and -dynamic in the command
line; my patches removed the -static option.

Subsequently, we found that the "clear" command was failing on some
systems with this message:

        'xterm-color': unknown terminal type.

Further problem and experimentation found the problem:

A search of the ncurses source code found this comment in
ncurses/curses.priv.h:

/*
 * The filesystem database normally uses a single-letter for the lower level
 * of directories.  Use a hexadecimal code for filesystems which do not
 * preserve mixed-case names.
 */
#if MIXEDCASE_FILENAMES
#define LEAF_FMT "%c"
#else
#define LEAF_FMT "%02x"
#endif

I therefore ran this command in the installed terminfo directory:

        awk 'BEGIN{for (k = 97; k <= 122; ++k) printf("ln -s %c %02x\n", k, 
k)}' | sh

That executed the series of commands

        ln -s a 61
        ln -s b 62
        ...
        ln -s y 79
        ln -s z 7a

Now the "clear" command can find its terminfo entry.

These links need to be created by "make install" on Mac OS X systems
that have case-insensitive filesystems.  It would presumably be
innocuous to create them on all platforms.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: address@hidden  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       address@hidden  address@hidden -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
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