Re: Determine when to use --enable-widec?

[Jeffrey Walton]

On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 5:30 AM Thomas Dickey <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On Wed, May 29, 2019 at 11:20:03PM -0400, Jeffrey Walton wrote:
> > Hi Everyone,
> >
> > Forgive my ignorance... How can I determine whether I should build a
> > narrow or wide version of Ncurses? That is, when should I use
> > --enable-widec?
> >
> > My use case is updating Ncurses on old distros and distros which
> > charge for updates. I use old distros for their old compilers and
> > runtimes. I prefer to supply the same as the distro provided.
>
> generally "ldd" shows the library pathname.  If it shows "ncursesw",
> that's widec.  Some rename the library, but "nm" (or "nm -D") generally
> show the symbols.  If any have "_wch", that's widec, for instance.
>
> (there's other cases as well, but that's the simple ones)

Thanks Thomas.

So if I find, say, /usr/lib/libncursesw.so, then I should use
--enable-widec. Does that sound about correct?

Or should I aim for the negative case. If I don't find
/usr/lib/libncurses.so, then I should use --enable-widec.

The reason I bring the negative case is, some platforms are going to
be a tab bit unusual, and I'd like a sane default. Solaris is probably
one of those platforms with .../lib/32/ and .../lib/64 directories.

Jeff