>> Ahem.   Make build *does not* install curses.h!
> "Bet me."

You are technically correct, of course.  If you were able to do a make
build without having it fail, you would wind up with a new version of
curses.h installed in /usr/include at the end of the whole process.

What I meant, which I think is pretty obvious, is that make build
does not install curses.h in time to do the libcurses build any good.
The worst part of this is that you could have a completely up-to-date
tree, and if there were a bug in /usr/include/curses.h, you would
still have the bug in libcurses.a even after a make build, unless the
bug either didn't affect the library or caused it to fail to build.

I think that the correct solution to this problem is something like
what jtc described, and what the X11 build does, which is that at the
beginning of the build, you do a recursive ``make includes'', which
fully populates /usr/src/include (or maybe
/usr/src/${MACHINE}/include).   All subsequent steps in the build
reference /usr/src/${MACHINE}/include rather than /usr/include.   This
assures you of a clean build (at least insofar as includes are
concerned) if you type ``make build.''

			       _MelloN_