Subject: ncurses vs. BSD curses
To: None <tech-userlevel@netbsd.org>
From: Bruce J.A. Nourish <bjan@bjan.freeshell.org>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 03/22/2004 11:29:30
Hey everyone,

I'm not trying to start a religious war here, but I can't find any
mention of this subject in the archives, and I think it's worth
discussing.

I had always assumed, as it is developed under the auspices of the FSF,
that ncurses was L?GPL'd. I found out recently that this is not the
case, rather that it is released under an MIT license. So I was 
thinking, what if we replaced our curses library with ncurses?

Pro's:
 * 100% compatibility with ncurses :-)
 * No future work on libcurses to add SYSV extensions

Con's:
 * Initial work to bring it into the base system
 * Size - stripped shared libs: ncurses 302k; ours 142k 
 * Other things?

It seems that FreeBSD uses ncurses, as does every Linux distribution.
This does not, of course, mean that they're right, but we should ask
ourselves if they're onto something.

-- 
Bruce J.A. Nourish <bjan@bjan.freeshell.org> http://bjan.freeshell.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org