Re: Issues cross-compiling ncurses-5.7 on Fedora Core 9

[Thomas Dickey]

On Sat, 18 Jul 2009, Philip A. Prindeville wrote:

> I'm the lead developer on the Astlinux project.  We recently did a
> version bump of ncurses from 5.5 to 5.7.
>
> Immediately we noticed that the "run_tic.sh" stage went into an endless
> loop and started using all of the CPU.
>
> We reproduced this on a couple of different platforms (FC9 and Centos5).
>
> A quick search revealed this was a known issue.

I documented this in the changelog:

20081012
        + update "konsole" terminfo to 1.6.6, needs today's fix for tic -TD
        + add logic to tic for cancelling strings in user-defined capabilities,
          overlooked til now.

It's been reported a couple of times since.  The problem is that pre-5.7 
tic doesn't work with cancelled strings.  (The problems with the shared 
libraries, which I saw in google appear to be a bug as well, though the 
comments indicate that it's perhaps not mine).

> I went to the project home page:
>
> http://www.gnu.org/software/ncurses/
>
> to see if this was a previously filed bug or not, but there doesn't seem
> to be a link to bugzilla for ncurses.

_this_ is the bug-tracking.

> $ ps -p30377 -fwwww
> UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
> philipp  30377 30370 97 14:12 pts/30   00:49:14 tic -x -s -o 
> /home/philipp/kernel/build_i586/staging_dir/usr/share/terminfo terminfo.tmp
> $
>
>
> Repeating "lsof" tells me that the output file is holding steady:
>
> $ lsof -p30377
> COMMAND   PID    USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE    SIZE    NODE NAME
> tic     30377 philipp  cwd    DIR    8,7    4096 6373754 
> /home/philipp/kernel/build_i586/ncurses-5.7/misc
> tic     30377 philipp  rtd    DIR    8,2    4096       2 /
> tic     30377 philipp  txt    REG    8,2   54200  453657 /usr/bin/tic
> tic     30377 philipp  mem    REG    8,2  142216 1128427 /lib64/ld-2.8.so
> tic     30377 philipp  mem    REG    8,2   79832  273624 
> /usr/lib64/libtic.so.5.6
> tic     30377 philipp  mem    REG    8,2 1804104 1128448 /lib64/libc-2.8.so
> tic     30377 philipp  mem    REG    8,2  134216 1128692 /lib64/libtinfo.so.5.6
> tic     30377 philipp    0u   CHR 136,30              32 /dev/pts/30
> tic     30377 philipp    1u   CHR 136,30              32 /dev/pts/30
> tic     30377 philipp    2u   CHR 136,30              32 /dev/pts/30
> tic     30377 philipp    3r   REG    8,7  952534 6375375 
> /home/philipp/kernel/build_i586/ncurses-5.7/misc/terminfo.tmp
> $
>
>
> Is there a patch for this issue?

The quick workaround would be to use the older terminfo.src (which happens 
to be on my ftp area) in the build for ncurses 5.7 if you're really forced 
to install it on a system with an older tic.  I'd simply replace that in 
the misc subdirectory.

See

        ftp://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.gz


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