Re: Portable menu and forms libraries

[Bill Gray]

Hi Thomas,  all,

   Turns out it's indeed possible (with modest effort) to use the menu 
library with PDCurses or PDCursesMod.  I had to add a rudimentary 
curses.priv.h and nc_alloc.h,  and modify the PDCursesMod makefiles and 
(existing) ncurses_cfg.h slightly.  (Haven't pushed this to GitHub yet.)

   I also had to change exactly one line in the ncurses menu library 
code,  at line 69 of menu/menu.priv.h :

#define Get_Menu_UserWin(menu) ((menu)->userwin ? \
    (menu)->userwin : CURRENT_SCREEN->_stdscr)

   This relies on access to SCREEN internals,  which (a) are apt to 
differ among curses implementations and (b) are opaque in PDCursesMod 
anyway.

   I've worked around this by changing the above to use the StdScreen 
macro :

#define Get_Menu_UserWin(menu) ((menu)->userwin ? \
    (menu)->userwin : StdScreen( CURRENT_SCREEN))

   In the PDCursesMod version of curses.priv.h,  I have

#define StdScreen(sp) stdscr

   (compared to the definition (sp)->_stdscr in the ncurses version of 
that file.)

   It'd be nice if the ncurses version of menu.priv.h could have a 
similar change.  PDCurses* users could then use the ncurses menu library 
source without altering anything at all.

   With that,  I was able to modify PDCursesMod to build the menu 
library,  then compile demo_menus.c and link it to the resulting library 
and the PDCursesMod library,  and run it without problems.  (I did have 
to use 32-bit chtypes;  the default PDCursesMod 64-bit chtypes got their 
upper half stripped,  resulting in default-color menus.  Haven't puzzled 
that one out yet...)

   The forms library,  on the other hand,  makes extensive use of 
ncurses internals and will take much more effort.  I've put use of that 
with PDCurses* on hold.

Thanks!       -- Bill