[Buildroot] [PATCH] ncurses: make host-ncurses use host terminfo

[Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@bootlin.com>]

Hello,

On Tue, 10 Jul 2018 09:46:03 -0700, Hollis Blanchard wrote:
> # HG changeset patch
> # User Hollis Blanchard <hollis_blanchard@mentor.com>
> # Date 1531239381 25200
> #      Tue Jul 10 09:16:21 2018 -0700
> # Node ID 5f7fe697b92ac0145674a6c96aad0f787b4bae32
> # Parent  d71314cdccf1993ccdb05cddb16a5491f0bf723e

This mercurial stuff is a bit annoying, as it becomes part of the
commit log. I removed it when applying the patch.

> ncurses: make host-ncurses use host terminfo
> 
> Host GDB suffers a serious problem: pressing backspace (or ^W ^U or any other
> "delete" key) results in a plain space being printed instead, making the
> command prompt almost completely unusable.
> 
> That's because it's using host-ncurses, which embeds a path for the terminfo
> database into the library itself. That path ends up being something like
> /home/hollisb/buildroot.git/output/host/share/terminfo, which obviously doesn't
> generally exist other hosts. ('relocate-sdk.sh' cannot and does not edit
> binaries like libncurses.so.6, so doesn't resolve this problem.)
> 
> /usr/share/terminfo is a far better path to use, since it almost certainly
> exists on the host. Theoretically, it could be from a different ncurses version
> with incompatible terminfo database format, but this doesn't seem to be a
> problem in practice. (Future patches could address the theoretical problem if
> it actually appears in real life.)
> 
> This change allows buildroot's host gdb, which uses ncurses 6.x, to work on
> RHEL5, RHEL6, and RHEL7, which all provide terminfo from ncurses 5.x.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Hollis Blanchard <hollis_blanchard@mentor.com>

Applied, thanks!

Thomas Petazzoni
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Bootlin (formerly Free Electrons)
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com