Re: forcing applications to build against wide versions of ncurses

[Thomas Dickey]

On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Mike Frysinger wrote:

> rather than changing packages to include ncursesw/ncurses.h and link
> against -lncursesw, some people in Gentoo want to change the default headers
> and linkable libraries to point to the wide versions of ncurses ... so binary
> compatibility will be retained (libncurses.so.5 and libncursesw.so.5 will be
> the correct libraries), but when you do #include <ncurses.h> and -lncurses,
> you'll actually be including/linking the wide versions

The headers are designed to be compatible.
I don't follow the statement about binary compatibility (unless you're
saying that existing applications aren't relinked - but then GenToo
recompiles everything).

> personally, i dislike this idea, but i'd present some logic reasons when i say
> no, but i'm not exactly (really) an expert on ncurses :)
>
> can this safely be done in the first place ?  if you have an application that
> is not wide character aware, is it safe to build/link it against the wide
> version of ncurses ?

iirc (am not at home to check) there's nothing that would prevent it
from building/working.  There are probably applications with embedded
Latin-1 strings that would be interpreted as if they were UTF-8 - that's
one thing to watch out for.

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net