Re: Ncurses support?

[Jeffrey Walton]

> > My goal is to find a way to drop Ncurses from my build scripts. It
> > causes too much trouble.
>
> What trouble do you get? Portability problems?

Fails to build on some platforms. Solaris is the latest casualty.

> > The rub is, a lot of programs depend on it.
>
> What do these programs actually need? Ncurses? Any implementation of
> curses? Just the terminal info facilities?

I'm not certain. I neve made the distinction.

> > Is it possible to provide a Ncurses replacement via Gnulib? Is this
> > something the project would consider?
>
> So far, I'm not seeing a need. Ncurses is GNU, has regular releases,
> and supports most platforms nicely. When a package depends on it, I
> just install it.

Ncurses has a lot of problems:

1. Governance. There's no public Git or SVN server hosting the code.
There is no way to submit patches against master because master is
hidden. There are no backup administrators if the maintainer gets hit
by a bus. Select patches are distributed piecemeal, and there's no way
to know if we are missing an important bug fix. Project is hosted on a
private server, and not a GNU property.

2. Code quality. Awful, but this is my opinion. Trying to read the
Ncurses code is like trying to read GCC code. When I tried to track
down a memory leak, I found nearly everything was written in macros
that are stitched together to form a program.

3. Runtime execution. Leaks memory like a sieve. Impossible to test
with some tools. We can't differentiate the "good" memory leaks from
the "bad" memory leaks.

Jeff