On Wed, 13 Oct 2004, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:

> > On Interix, force inclusion of devel/ncurses/buildlink3.mk from
> > mk/curses.buildlink3.mk.  This forces inclusion of its builtin.mk too.
>
> What is mk/curses.buildlink3.mk used by? What is it for?

It's there for packages that need only rudimentary curses support (BSD
baseline) as opposed to "ncurses-compatible" support.  It basically looks to
see if /usr/include/[n]curses.h exists, and only if not, includes
devel/ncurses/buildlink3.mk to provide a backing implementation.

www/lynx uses it, for instance.

> If it was used, then packages built on (non-Interix) systems that have
> /usr/include/curses.h or /usr/include/ncurses.h could be reused on systems
> without the needed curses libraries (or wrong version).

Your implied connotation is that the "needed curses libraries" might or
might not be in the base system because of packaging, such as with
pkgsrc-based Linux.  :)  Perhaps curses.buildlink3.mk should heed
PREFER_PKGSRC.ncurses to address this issue?

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@duh.org> <tv@pobox.com>