Fussy, pedantic issue with ncurses libraries

[lars_the_bear]

Hi folks

It seems that the way I installed Gentoo, I ended up with libnursesw.so separated from libtinfow.so. I understand that ncurses can be built this way, or with these libraries combined. So far as I can see, most other Linux distributions have them combined.

My applications that use ncursesw have a single set of Makefiles that work on many Linux platforms -- Fedora, Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi at least -- but they don't work on Gentoo, because they don't explicitly link libtinfow.so, because they don't need to.

The solution is simple, in principle -- just modify all the Makefiles to have '-lncursesw -ltinfow', rather than just '-lnursesw'. But this means that I can no longer maintain a single set of Makefiles for all Linux platforms.

I'm curious whether this split between libncurses and libtinfo is peculiar to the way I set up Gentoo, or whether it will always be like that on a Gentoo system.

And if it will always be like that, I'm wondering if there's some non-ugly way I can modify my makefiles so that the link includes -ltinfow only on Gentoo. Or, perhaps, only on systems where this library exists. I can think of some ugly ways to do this, but surely there is some elegant way?

Incidentally, there seems to have been a fair bit of discussion of this point about ten years ago, and I don't think the Gentoo way of handling libncursesw is accidental. But it does seem to be out of line with other Linux variants.

BR, Lars.

[sam_]

You should use pkg-config instead, not hardcoding libraries: LIBS = $(pkg-config --libs ncursesw).

Anyway, see https://bugs.gentoo.org/457530. There's some more detailed discussion somewhere but I can't dig it up right now.

If you look at the Fedora packaging, they use a linker script hack to try to hide the issue.

Mod edit: Trailing period exorcised from the above URL. — JRG