Hi,
I'm a maintainer of sbt, an interactive build tool used for Scala programming language. Recently there was a bug report from Arch Linux users that updating to ncurses 6.0+20170527-1 throws an exception at startup [1].
It turned out that this is due to [jline2#281], which did not handle the hexadecimal output in infocmp.
Given that infocmp itself is called indirectly there's not much the users can do to hold off the upgrade of ncurses. I see this is an ominous sign since in some time horizon, the change will be propagated to more wider usage beyond Arch Linux or Mac Port users who might be willing to downgrade.
Also note that Scala comes with a REPL interpreter, which also uses a fork of JLine.
Are there potential workaround for this? Fixing JLine and updating to a new version alone I don't think is a good solution since that would mean that all older versions of sbt or Scala REPL would no longer work.
If the output of infocmp is intended to be consumed programmatically, there might be other programs that would run into this problem. Would you consider rolling this change back, or provide an environment variable to disable it? (I don't know if environment variable can be set if infocmp is called by someone else).
Thanks,
-eugene