Re: Ncurses support?

[Bruno Haible]

Jeffrey Walton wrote:
> > What trouble do you get? Portability problems?
> 
> Fails to build on some platforms. Solaris is the latest casualty.

On Solaris, why not use '-lcurses' instead of '-lncurses'?

> > 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.

You can download weekly snapshots at
https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/#download_ncurses . That should be
good enough.

> There are no backup administrators if the maintainer gets hit
> by a bus.

A project can live on even if it had only one maintainer. For example,
GNU Common Lisp lived on after William Shelter, its main developer, died.

> Select patches are distributed piecemeal, and there's no way
> to know if we are missing an important bug fix.

That's not the impression I get. See above.

> Project is hosted on a private server, and not a GNU property.

Why would that matter, for the consumers of a GNU package?
I find it equally dangerous to rely on packages hosted at github.com.

> 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.

Macros are inevitable if you want to have the same code once with
multibyte characters and once with wchar_t characters, without code
duplication.

> 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.

Have you reported it?
https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses.faq.html#report_bugs

All your points, to me, are not a reason to question the use of ncurses
on platforms where it compiles.

Bruno