Re: Build errors at link time - what am I missing?

[Brendan O'Dea]

On Thu, 1 Dec 2022 at 07:26, Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> wrote:
> > However, later on in configure I get:-
> >     configure: WARNING: Cannot find -ltermlib, -lcurses, or -ltermcap
> > and then at link time there are loads of undefined references to
> > tputs, tgoto, and a lot of other txxxxx symbols.
> >
> > So presumably I need to build one of those libraries, or is there
> > something simpler I can do?

If you don't have permission to install packages, then you will need
to build some of the dependencies in your home directory.

> The system does have libncurses, it's in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu. Is
> it possible that directory isn't on the cc/linker search path?  How do
> I add it?

Debian splits libraries into runtime and development components: the
runtime package contains just the versioned shared library such as
libncurses.so.6, and the development package contains the symlink to
the appropriate version of the shared library (e.g. libncurses.so ->
libncurses.so.6), and the header files.

So even if libncurses.so.6 is installed, that is not enough to build
with.  If you're building in your home directory, you can probably
just get:

  https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses.html

and build that with --prefix=$HOME.  I think that this will provide an
appropriate flex:

  https://invisible-island.net/reflex/reflex.html

The only other things that I build the Debian package with are Perl
and Xaw, which you can skip if you don't fancy building Perl, and
don't care about X.

--bod