On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 11:52:07PM -0400, iMac wrote:
> on 10/27/05 11:25 PM, Aaron J. Grier at agrier@poofygoof.com wrote:
>
> > 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?

that's assuming that the APIs between curses and ncurses are identical.
for the most part they are, and if your app isn't critical, it may be
fine.  I wouldn't count on it though and it's just plain luck that it
works.

best choice of action would be to compile a new version of your app for
your current OS install.

-- 
  Aaron J. Grier | "Not your ordinary poofy goof." | agrier@poofygoof.com
              "silly brewer, saaz are for pils!"  --  virt