Re: I've made a simple program, showing UTF-8 lower but not uppercase working

[Thomas Dickey]

On Fri, 23 Sep 2005, amores perros wrote:

> > It would be useful for the legacy stuff that doesn't have any locale 
> > support, but I've only seen comments about a couple of _those_ in the past 
> > few weeks (not on Debian though).  Since it would rely on the application 
> > setting up its locale properly, it would mean that the application has been 
> > updated - in which case there's little reason for not also rebuilding 
> > against ncursesw.
>
> I'm not sure I follow the end.

I guess it's complicated to explain without an example...

> Now I understand that libncursesw is only the dll, and is available
> for debian stable, and endusers of a binary distribution only need that.
>
> Developers will need libncursesw-dev, to have the headers at least.

A packager could use the headers from libncursesw with libncurses,
since the places where curses.h differ are ifdef'd with 
_XOPEN_SOURCE_EXTENDED

> I think I'm happy enough with this -- I can adjust my system so I
> can compile and link to ncursesw.

That's the simplest solution.

> Whoever packages a binary distribution, will have to choose to
> build either with ncurses (usable by everyone) or with
> ncursesw (slightly restricted audience, but supports UTF-8).
>
> However, re:
>
> > there's little reason for not also rebuilding against ncursesw.
>
> The reason for not rebuilding against ncursesw would be if the
> distributor wanted to distribute a binary which worked on systems
> without libncursesw?

But that wouldn't work, since libncurses doesn't handle UTF-8.
It's rather unlikely that an old system would have a new version of
libncurses which was contrived to make Latin-1 work in a UTF-8 locale.

> I suppose the way for everyone to have & eat cake, would
> be for the distributor to make both versions, with slightly
> different names (one linking to libncurses, and one linking to
> libncursesw).
>
> Or is it possible to compile & distribute a binary which links
> only statically to libncursesw, and which therefore does not
> require any libncursesw dll (libncursesw.so I assume) on the
> enduser system?

Sure - configure ncurses to produce static libraries and link your
application against that, using the -L option to specify the directory 
containing the static libraries.  That generally works on Linux, but not 
necessarily on other systems.

no problem

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