Re: ncurses 5.3 backwards compatibility

[Thomas E. Dickey]

On Fri, 8 Nov 2002, Chris Zubrzycki wrote:

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> I was wondering why the major number for the ncurses libraries stayed
> the same since you removed some elements from the interface. Upon
> upgrading, a number of apps now break, including ettercap,  lynx and
> hexcurse. (although some like nano an aatest still work.)
>
> here are the errors from lynx:
> lynx undefined reference to _acs_map expected to be defined in
> /sw/lib/libncurses.dylib.5
> lynx undefined reference to _strfnames expected to be defined in
> /sw/lib/libncurses.dylib.5
> lynx undefined reference to _strnames expected to be defined in
> /sw/lib/libncurses.dylib.5
>
> I work with the fink project on Mac OS X, so I cannot put ncurses 5.3
> into fink for everyone to use unless it is 100% compatible. are these
> bugs, or what? I read the faq and release notes, and saw nothing about
> breaking binary compatibility. Thanks guys, ncurses is still great :-)

It appears you're talking about changes I made last year (see 20011208
for instance).  Essentially yes a bug - in Mac's runtime loader if the
configure script is reporting things properly.  It checks if a workaround
is needed to link in data items from a shared library, using functions
to wrap them.  The workaround has been in ncurses for some time; last
year I added acs_map to this case (cygwin's linker is more-broken than
the previous benchmark ;-).

Comparing with 5.2 though, and seeing the comment about strnames makes it
apparent that the problem isn't just my changes - the 5.2 version would
have had the same issue with strnames.  I suspect that someone tweaked
the 5.2 package (or the linker changed).  So that's the issue to resolve.

-- 
T.E.Dickey <address@hidden>
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net