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Re: Ncurses & native WIN32 support...


From: Austin Gilbert
Subject: Re: Ncurses & native WIN32 support...
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2005 17:23:32 -0600


On Nov 8, 2005, at 3:57 PM, Mark Hessling wrote:



---- Original message ----
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2005 15:31:05 -0600
From: Austin Gilbert <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: Ncurses & native WIN32 support...
To: William McBrine <address@hidden>
Cc: address@hidden


On Nov 7, 2005, at 11:53 PM, William McBrine wrote:

On 11/7/05, Austin Gilbert <address@hidden> wrote:

Is anyone working on a native version of Ncurses for Windows??

Try PDCurses:

http://pdcurses.sf.net/

It's 90% compatible with ncurses.


Yes, I'm aware of PDCurses.  I also question the 90% figure...

Given that ncurses has introduced significant wide character support, then 90% would be an excessive
claim. If compared to System VR4 curses then 90% would be reasonable.


I can tell you that PDCurses doesn't  compile on my Mac OS 10.4.3
machine out of the box :( This makes me somewhat concerned about its

But OSX 10.4.3 is not on the list of explicitly supported operating systems, and as far as I know
X11 on OSX is not installed into common locations.

Output from ./configure on Mac OS 10.4.3:

checking for location of X headers... found in /usr/X11R6/include/ X11 /usr/X11R6/include/X11
checking for location of X libraries...  found in /usr/X11R6/lib

That looks pretty standard to me.... the errors are actually in the linking stage - but those don't really belong on this list.


This is more a problem with the Mac, not
PDCurses. And not having access to a Mac with a useable X11 installation makes it difficult to support. This is where people with the platform access and the ability to fix these problems are
encouraged to help.

I understand not having access to an OSX machine makes it impossible to support. If I decide to go with PDCurses, I might help work through the OSX issues.



portability.  Other things that concern me about PDCurses:

1. referring to X11 as an operating system (from http://
pdcurses.sourceforge.net/)

PDCurses is a public domain curses library for X11, Win32, DOS and
OS/2, with most functions available in System V R4 curses. It
supports most compilers on the above operating systems.

Yes, technically incorrect, so I have now corrected the wording.

Thnx.




2. referring to C as an interpreted language ( from http://
sourceforge.net/projects/pdcurses )

Operating System: OS Independent (Written in an interpreted language)

Sourceforge changed their Trove catergories, so that when there was only one category for "portable to various platforms", they changed the categories and the text of the category is now misleading.
This has now been fixed.

Sorry for bringing the axe down - sounds like you got burned by changes on sourceforge.


I'm intrigued to understand why the above descriptive errors make you concerned about PDCurses'
portability.

If you're looking at the web page for a library and notice technical inconsistencies, it just doesn't give you a great deal of confidence in the claims the page makes.

Having fixed these descriptive errors are you now less concerned?

I'm still skeptical, but don't take it personally mate. I am going to try compiling PDCurses on windows and see what it does.... Couldn't get it configured on stock installation of SuSE 9.3 (gcc 3.3.3), SuSE seems to be missing the Intrinsic.h X11 header.

Another reason I am considering going with NCurses is the document is extremely accessible. It took about a minute to find tutorials, example code, etc. (http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/ncurses/ncurses- intro.html). I wasn't able to locate similar links for PDCurses, and no documentation was provided in sourceforge. Are the interfaces 100% the same between PDCurses and NCurses ??






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