Re: linking with curses

[Thomas Dickey]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2007 at 08:17:32AM +0300, Michail Vidiassov wrote:
> Dear Thomas,
>
> On Sat, 1 Sep 2007, Thomas Dickey wrote:
>
>>> How would the ideal world without workarounds for other workarounds for
>>> ancient bugs look like?
>>
>> #include <curses.h>
>>
>> -lcurses
>>
>> (but the non-ideal world has different implementations and versions of 
>> curses)
>
> In that view, may be "must" is a too strong word in the following
> quote from ncurses(3)

well, the organization of the manpage may be a problem (since there
are many things to discuss...).  The -lncursesw part is discussed
under "ALTERNATE CONFIGURATIONS" (which is pointed at the end
of this paragraph):

       A  program  using  these  routines  must  be  linked with the -lncurses
       option, or (if it  has  been  generated)  with  the  debugging  library
       -lncurses_g.   (Your  system  integrator  may also have installed these
       libraries under the names  -lcurses  and  -lcurses_g.)   The  ncurses_g
       library  generates  trace logs (in a file called 'trace' in the current
       directory) that describe curses  actions.   See  also  the  section  on
       ALTERNATE CONFIGURATIONS.

Your quote does not appear to have that - I added that in 2006/02/05, so
it's in ncurses 5.6, but not 5.5.

>   A program using these  routines  must  be  linked  with  the  -lncurses
>   option,  or  (if  it  has  been  generated)  with the debugging library
>   -lncurses_g.  (Your system integrator may  also  have  installed  these
>   libraries  under  the  names  -lcurses  and -lcurses_g.)
>
> Nowdays when ncurses is more likely to be the only library in the system
> than not, -lncurses instead -lcurses just leads away from the one true path 
> of "The Single UNIX Specification"  :)

In the case where ncurses is the only such library, it would be nice to
assume that it's also symlinked so that -lcurses works.

(sometime when I complete my threading example, we'll have 3 flavors to
get confused by ;-)

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <address@hidden>
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net

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