on 10/27/05 11:25 PM, Aaron J. Grier at agrier@poofygoof.com wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 11:15:58PM -0400, iMac wrote:
>> libcurses.so.5  --  What is it and where can I get it?
>> 
>> I have downloaded several packages on my computer that won't execute,
>> and they complain that they can't find "libcurses.so.5".   Does
>> anybody know what this is and where it can be found?
> 
> man curses
> 
> it's a library for text-mode screen manipulations, and adds a layer of
> abstraction to raw terminal emulation.  your binary is looking for
> version 5 of the library, but it's not on your system.
> 
> NetBSD 2.0 ships with libcurses.so.6.  NetBSD 1.6 shipped with
> libcurses.so.5, so if you grab the old tarballs, you should be able to
> selectively unpack libcurses.so.5 from base.tgz.  (you'll want both
> /usr/lib/libcurses.so.5 and /usr/lib/libcurses.so.5.*)

Ah, okay.   So what about ncurses?  I'd imagine that they are pretty much
the same thing -- here's why:   I downloaded and installed ncurses-5.3, and
looking at the ncurses files in the /usr/pkg/share directory, I discovered a
file called libncurses.so.5.  I was feeling a bit experimental and created a
symbolic link to libncurses.so.5 by typing:

ln -s libncurses.so.5 libcurses.so.5

I don't know how stable this is going to be, but it does appear to be
working.   Does anybody know if this is a bad idea?

Thanks for the info.

Regards