Subject: Re: libcurses.so.5
To: Aaron J. Grier <port-mac68k@netbsd.org>
From: William Duke <wduke@cogeco.ca>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 11/09/2005 19:48:49
>> 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.
> 

I would love to do just that, but I haven't figured out how to do that just
yet.  I still have to figure out where I can get the sources.  Then I have
to figure out how to compile in this strange land.