Multi-minute startup hangs on Ubuntu 16.04

[Sijmen J. Mulder]

Hi all,

Doing some explorative compatibility testing, I found this odd issue
with poke on Ubuntu 16.04.

When I start it, poke prints:

       _____
   ---'   __\_______
              ______)  GNU poke 0.1-beta
              __)
             __)
   ---._______)
  
  Copyright (C) 2019, 2020 The poke authors.
  License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later

(with no newline) and then it hangs for several minutes. Then continues:

   <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
  This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
  There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
  
  Powered by Jitter UNKNOWN.
  Perpetrated by Jose E. Marchesi.
  
  hserver listening in port 39019.
  
  For help, type "

(again with no newline), and hangs again for several minutes. Finally,
it prints:

  .exit" to leave the program.
  (poke)

After that the program seems to work fine.

Built from commit 750c179b, from within pkgsrc, linking against:
 - readline 8.0
 - gettext-tools 0.2 (textstyle)
 - json-c 0.15
 - boehm-gc 8.0.4
 - ncurses 6.2

Sijmen