Re: guile-ncurses unicode support

[Frank Terbeck]

Hi!

tmarjeski@gmail.com wrote:
[…]
> I'm having issues running the game this way, and I suspect there is no
> unicode support enabled on the guile-ncurses package build, even though
> it says that there is. Everything is working fine on my Arch system
> using guile and guile-ncurses from their package manager.
>
> When I run my game (which uses unicode characters), I only see "?" in
> place of the unicode. I attempted to `guix build guile-ncurses
> --no-substitutes` and install from there, but it did not work.
>
> Does this sound like an issue with guile-ncurses, or perhaps I am
> missing something crucial for `guix shell` to work properly?

I have just run into this as well,  though I am using guix on top of De-
bian. But that difference should not matter.

I believe this is an issue with the guile-ncurses build in guix, that is
caused by an issue in  guile-ncurses' configure.ac, that seems to behave
in  unexpected ways  with the  "--with-ncursesw" option,  that the  guix
build uses.


To check I've put in this patch into guile-ncurses:

diff --git a/configure.ac b/configure.ac
index 51cc785..6615664 100644
--- a/configure.ac
+++ b/configure.ac
@@ -115,6 +115,8 @@ AC_ARG_WITH(ncursesw,
             [with_ncursesw=no],
             [with_ncursesw=check])
 
+echo "DEBUG: ($with_ncursesw)"
+
 AC_MSG_NOTICE([checking for ncurses])
 
 have_ncursesw_curses_h=no


I am using this guix-shell from a guile-ncurses git repository clone:

% guix shell --pure ncurses coreutils grep sed gawk gcc-toolchain   \
                    make autoconf automake libtool pkg-config guile \
                    texinfo


With that, just calling the configure script:

% ./configure
…
DEBUG: (check)
configure: checking for ncurses
checking for ncursesw/curses.h... no
checking for ncurses/curses.h... no
checking for curses.h... yes
checking for library containing initscr... -lncursesw
checking for library containing u32_strconv_from_locale... -lunistring
checking for library containing new_menu... -lmenuw
checking for library containing new_form... -lformw
checking for library containing new_panel... -lpanelw
…

That looks very much like wide-character ncurses, and indeed if I build
it and run a little test script I get this:

% make
…
% ./tools/uninstalled-env guile -c '(use-modules (ncurses curses)) (format #t 
"wide-ncurses? ~a~%" %wide-ncurses)' 2> /dev/null
wide-ncurses? #t

That looks good.


Now with --with-ncursesw:

% ./configure --with-ncursesw
…
DEBUG: (no)
configure: checking for ncurses
checking for ncurses/curses.h... no
checking for curses.h... yes
checking for library containing initscr... -lncurses
checking for library containing new_menu... -lmenu
checking for library containing new_form... -lform
checking for library containing new_panel... -lpanel
checking for library containing initscr... (cached) -lncurses
…

…unexpected. Reading the configure.ac file looks to me like it is inten-
ded, that with  this option things should actually error  out instead of
falling back to the non-wide ncurses build,  but this looks like it is a
synonym for --without-ncursesw.


Just to check, if I run my little test script:

% make
…
% ./tools/uninstalled-env guile -c '(use-modules (ncurses curses)) (format #t 
"wide-ncurses? ~a~%" %wide-ncurses)' 2> /dev/null
wide-ncurses? #f


Which confirms the suspicion.


I think what is actually intended is this:

diff --git a/configure.ac b/configure.ac
index 51cc785..cd8b8d4 100644
--- a/configure.ac
+++ b/configure.ac
@@ -112,7 +112,7 @@ esac
 AC_ARG_WITH(ncursesw,
             [AS_HELP_STRING([--without-ncursesw],
                             [Don't use ncursesw (wide character support)])],
-            [with_ncursesw=no],
+            [with_ncursesw=$with_ncursesw],
             [with_ncursesw=check])
 
 AC_MSG_NOTICE([checking for ncurses])
@@ -147,13 +147,15 @@ then
                   [AC_MSG_FAILURE([curses.h could not be found])])
 fi
 
-AS_IF([test "$with_ncursesw" = check],
+AS_IF([test "$with_ncursesw" = check || test "$with_ncursesw" = yes],
       [AC_SEARCH_LIBS([initscr], [ncursesw],
                       [AC_DEFINE([HAVE_NCURSESW],
                                  [1],
                                  [Define if you have libncursesw])
                        with_ncursesw=yes],
-                      [AC_MSG_FAILURE([--with-ncursesw was given, but, test 
for ncursesw failed])])])
+                      [AS_IF([test "$with_ncursesw" = check],
+                             [with_ncursesw=no],
+                             [AC_MSG_FAILURE([--with-ncursesw was given, but, 
test for ncursesw failed])])])])
 
 AS_IF([test "$with_ncursesw" = no],
       [AC_SEARCH_LIBS([initscr], [ncurses],


I  am Cc:ing  bug-guile-ncurses@gnu.org, which  is the  contact for  the
maintainer as  per the  guile-ncurses homepage.  I am  not an  expert in
autoconf, so this might not be the most idiomatic way of doing this.


In the meantime, the guix  build could just drop --without-ncursesw from
their build instructions to make this work: Guix's ncurses has wide-cha-
racter support and the default of  guile-ncurses is to test for this, so
it will succeed. A patch for that might look like this (untested):


diff --git a/gnu/packages/guile-xyz.scm b/gnu/packages/guile-xyz.scm
index 94417079c7..982b59efe7 100644
--- a/gnu/packages/guile-xyz.scm
+++ b/gnu/packages/guile-xyz.scm
@@ -2718,8 +2718,12 @@ (define-public guile-ncurses
                   (guix build utils))
        #:imported-modules ((guix build guile-build-system)
                            ,@%gnu-build-system-modules)
-       #:configure-flags (list "--with-ncursesw" ; Unicode support
-                               "--with-gnu-filesystem-hierarchy")
+       #:configure-flags (list
+                          ;; This is currently commented out due to a bug
+                          ;; in configure.ac of guile-ncurses, which makes
+                          ;; this behave just like --without-ncurses.
+                          ;;"--with-ncursesw" ; Unicode support
+                          "--with-gnu-filesystem-hierarchy")
        #:phases
        (modify-phases %standard-phases
          (add-before 'build 'fix-libguile-ncurses-file-name


Regards, Frank