Re: Slang has too many bugs

[Jordi Mallach]

Hi Benno,

Ugh, I remember skimming this on my phone and then it got hidden in the
pile of unsorted email. There's an email problem around here and no
time to get it sorted. 😅

Sorry for the very late reply, and thanks for the pings.

Let's see:

El dg. 13 de 09 de 2020 a les 12:45 +0200, en/na Benno Schulenberg va
escriure:
> Hello Jordi,
> 
> Last week I have spent some time exploring nano in the Debian
> installer [1].
> Soon I noticed that the cursor disappears when doing the slightest
> unusual
> thing, for example by typing an unbound key: M-X. [2]  Weirdly, the
> cursor
> reappears when that key is typed again.  :|  Then yesterday I noticed
> that
> there is no cursor at the prompt when typing ^W or ^R or ^O, but it
> appears
> when typing that keystroke again. [3]
> 
> I found a workaround for the first bug, but only when the user does
> not
> use -x/--nohelp.  I do not know how to work around it with -x/--
> nohelp,
> nor how to work around the second bug.
> 
> To see how nano would fare when using ncurses, I built a tiny nano on
> an
> Ubuntu 20.04 partition, then booted again into the Debian net
> installer,
> chose the "Installer" item, ran through the steps until the disks
> were
> detected, then went back to the main menu and chose "Execute a
> shell".
> Then I did:
> 
>   mkdir /Ubuntu
>   mount /dev/sda9 /Ubuntu
>   cp -v /Ubuntu/home/ben/Sources/NANO/src/nano  /bin/nn
>   cp -v /Ubuntu/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libncursesw.so*  /lib/x86_64-
> linux-gnu/
>   umount /Ubuntu
> 
> Then I ran nn, typed M-X and ^W and did all other things -- the
> cursor
> did not disappear.  When using ncurses, nano works fine.
> 
> So... I have had enough of Slang.  If it cannot even do something
> basic
> like showing the cursor, then nano should _not be making use of
> Slang,
> ever.
> 
> The next release of nano will still contain the current workarounds
> for
> Slang, but after that release, I will remove all support for it.

Right. I agree that Slang should be EOL for nano. Unfortunately, I've
been way too busy this year to pursue and push for d-i to abandon slang
entirely and move to ncurses.

> 
> The copied libncursesw.so* library is 226K on Ubuntu 20.04.  I think
> that is a small price to pay (on a total initrd size of 57M) for a
> nano that works as it should.

I agree. I'll talk to the d-i maintainer to see if it's realistic to
switch to ncurses for bullseye, but I assume it's not as we're nearing
the freeze and this is quite a low level change that would affect
cdebconf as well.

So, I wonder if you can consider holding with the slang support until
no more nano new versions can transition to debian testing, or else
we'll have to go with the last version supporting slang for the
bullseye stable release.

Jordi


-- 
Jordi Mallach <jordi@debian.org>
Debian Project