Re: Portable menu and forms libraries

[Thomas Dickey]

On Sat, Jul 20, 2024 at 09:14:00PM -0400, Bill Gray wrote:
> 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

offhand, I see (aside from the trace functions) curses.priv.h included
to provide _nc_screen_of and _nc_wcrtomb, which could be polished and given
a generic name via a #define - and the former is used only for the _sp
functions.

The various trace calls are all macros, which could be stubbed out in
pdcurses to mock up a curses.priv.h

But I haven't tried making a pdcurses-style "curses.priv.h" to see what
else is going to be a problem :-)

> 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
> 

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <dickey@invisible-island.net>
https://invisible-island.net

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