Re: [ANNOUNCE] util-linux v2.29-rc2

[Ruediger Meier <sweet_f_a@gmx.de>]

On Saturday 10 December 2016, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> On 20 Oct 2016 17:19, Karel Zak wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 20, 2016 at 01:34:24PM +0200, Ruediger Meier wrote:
> > > For me it looks like the even the ncurses authors do not like
> > > their own pc files. Disabled by default and it's a pain to get
> > > them built with correct names and installed in the right
> > > location. Even --prefix does not work for their pc files. Plus
> > > the backward compatibility problem ...
> >
> > OK, I have applied:
> >   
> > https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux/commit/e5cc93b5a8854fce80537
> >f86a244977df212dcb5
> >
> > with ncurses-config and fallback to old good AC_CHECK_LIB.
> >
> > We can add fallback to pkg-config too, but it sounds like overkill
> > if ncurses-config is everywhere.
>
> ugh, this change makes things worse.  the point of using pkg-config
> is also to get sane cross-compiling.  by always running `xxx-config`,
> it now breaks cross-compiling.

Works for me, when adding the ncurses5-config to the PATH
$ /usr/i686-w64-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/bin/ncurses5-config  --libs
-L/usr/i686-w64-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/lib -lncurses -ltinfo

> why can't we just tell distros to fix their ncurses install ?  it's
> not like 2.29, released a month ago, is getting rolled out to old
> distros where people can't update their ncurses systems.

I guess we should better fix ncurses upstream, to avoid having ncurses 
packages on any distros broken in different ways.

> "it's hard" is a pretty weak argument for distro maintainers.

No, no. This was about installing plain ncurses as a normal user 
(./configure --prefix ...). If upstream does not provide .pc files by 
default then we should not rely on them. You can't blame users nor 
package maintainers for installing a lib in a way like upstream 
recommends.

To re-add pkg-config plus fallback we could try AX_WITH_CURSES from 
autoconf-archive:
https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf-archive/ax_with_curses.html#ax_with_curses

cu,
Rudi