Portable menu and forms libraries

[Bill Gray]

Hello all,

   I'm occasionally asked about providing these two libraries for PDCurses 
and/or PDCursesMod.  I've never used either library and have only a superficial 
knowledge of them.

   I have no desire to re-invent either (they're pretty substantial libraries). 
 I'm looking for lazier ways of doing it.  Two occur to me :

   (1) The versions of these libraries that are provided with ncurses make use 
of internal ncurses functions.  I could (I think) modify the code so that it 
just uses Plain Old Curses functions,  and the libraries would then (at least 
in theory) work with any curses library.  Such changes might well be done along 
the lines of

#ifdef NCURSES_VERSION
   /* do things the way they're currently done */
#else
   /* do things portably to any curses library */
#endif

   in hopes of not actually forking Thomas' code.  (In some cases,  I might 
instead implement PDCursesMod versions of those ncurses functions.)

   (2) Or,  I could use some other implementation of these libraries.  They,  
too,  might conceivably be bound to a particular flavor of curses, but might be 
easier to modify to work with any curses library.

   The resulting menu and forms libraries would,  of course,  still be under 
the original license,  even though they'd be calling (public domain) PDCurses 
or PDCursesMod.  I suppose some people would prefer fully public domain 
libraries,  but if so... they can go ahead and write 'em.

   Any thoughts?

Thanks!           -- Bill