Re: Headsup: ncurses soname bump 5 to 6

Thomas Dickey <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.linux.debian.devel.general,gmane.linux.debian.devel.lsb
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Thu, 18 Sep 2008, Dan Kegel wrote:

> [+dickey]
>
> On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 8:45 AM, Florian Weimer <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> So the obvious solution seems to me then to build ncurses twice,
>>>> providing both libncurses5 and libncurses6 packages. What point do I miss?
>>>
>>> The crashes that will happen when both are loaded in a
>>> process's address space.
>>> ... and they couldn't add mouse-wheel support without breaking ABI ?
>>
>> AFAICT, the issue is that there aren't enough bits in an int to express
>> all the button events in the same way as before.  The new ABI reshuffles
>> the bits to make more room.

that, and the extended colors.

>> It should be possible to make this change in a less invasive way.

Then in that case, it should be possible for someone to submit a patch
which does that.

> A possible problem case is: an app built against version X of ncurses
> tries to load a shared library built against version X+1 of ncurses.

...and some do, and some don't use libtic and/or libterm.

> I didn't see any recent discussion about abi stability
> http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-ncurses
> If there is a realistic problem case, perhaps we should also discuss it there.
> - Dan

I don't recall anyone mentioning it recently (other than this thread, for 
example).  The ABI=6 code's been there a few years.

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net
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