Re: Add curses_version() in curses(3)

[Valery Ushakov <uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost>]

On Mon, Sep 02, 2019 at 12:32:51 +0300, Valery Ushakov wrote:

> Why would we ever want to report this completely random and unrelated
> fact?!
> 
> There were years when curses in the tree was unchanged.  In the mean
> time we have churned through dozens of netbsd versions.
> 
> Why are we trying to over-engineer this?

So the original claim was that it's needed by qemu.  I've downloaded
qemu-3.1.1, qemu-4.1.0, and qemu.git and I don't see it mentioned
anywhere, grep -r curses_version qemu* returns nothing.

I've searched github and I see manual pages to curses_version in
various formats, binding for curses_version for various scripting
languages.  configure tests that seems to check the presense of
curses_version to detect ncurses.

NB: have we just broken all those configure scripts?

I don't see this function actually being used for anything though I
haven't clicked through all the 31K occurrences.

I cannot really conceive how this function can be useful for anything
other that printing that information as part of some banner.  A
program that makes some kind of decision about how to use curses by
inspecting this value at runtime?  I'd sooner belive in unicorns :)

My preference would be to either revert this and pretend it never
happened or to make it return a static string "All your base are
belong to us" b/c we really don't have any meaningful versioning for
our curses and pretending otherwise by returning completely unrelated
netbsd version just makes us look stupid, IMO.  (As Christoph noted,
do we now have to bump netbsd version if we make a change in curses?
:)

I'm sorry I should have joined this bikeshed earlier, but as I said I
didn't realize what was actually going to be committed.  I'm sorry I
let Roy to be mobbed into this.

-uwe