Slang has too many bugs

[Benno Schulenberg]

Hello Jordi,

Last week I have spent some time exploring nano in the Debian installer [1].
Soon I noticed that the cursor disappears when doing the slightest unusual
thing, for example by typing an unbound key: M-X. [2]  Weirdly, the cursor
reappears when that key is typed again.  :|  Then yesterday I noticed that
there is no cursor at the prompt when typing ^W or ^R or ^O, but it appears
when typing that keystroke again. [3]

I found a workaround for the first bug, but only when the user does not
use -x/--nohelp.  I do not know how to work around it with -x/--nohelp,
nor how to work around the second bug.

To see how nano would fare when using ncurses, I built a tiny nano on an
Ubuntu 20.04 partition, then booted again into the Debian net installer,
chose the "Installer" item, ran through the steps until the disks were
detected, then went back to the main menu and chose "Execute a shell".
Then I did:

  mkdir /Ubuntu
  mount /dev/sda9 /Ubuntu
  cp -v /Ubuntu/home/ben/Sources/NANO/src/nano  /bin/nn
  cp -v /Ubuntu/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libncursesw.so*  /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/
  umount /Ubuntu

Then I ran nn, typed M-X and ^W and did all other things -- the cursor
did not disappear.  When using ncurses, nano works fine.

So... I have had enough of Slang.  If it cannot even do something basic
like showing the cursor, then nano should _not be making use of Slang,
ever.

The next release of nano will still contain the current workarounds for
Slang, but after that release, I will remove all support for it.

The copied libncursesw.so* library is 226K on Ubuntu 20.04.  I think
that is a small price to pay (on a total initrd size of 57M) for a
nano that works as it should.

Benno


[1] https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-builds/amd64/iso-cd/
[2] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?59091
[3] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?59107

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