Building gdb without ncursesw?

Building gdb without ncursesw?

[Paul Smith]

Hi all;

Is there a way to force gdb to build against ncurses, not ncursesw,
even if ncursesw headers/libraries do exist on the system?

The problem with ncursesw is that not all distributions put it onto the
system by default (everyone has ncurses by default) so if I compile GDB
against ncursesw then I have to get everyone to install extra packages.

There's really no need (that I can see) for ncursesw since we just
always uses utf8 all the time for everything.

But, I can't find any configure option or even cache setting I can use
to force the use of ncurses.

Cheers!

Re: Building gdb without ncursesw?

[Paul Smith]

On Sat, 2020-10-17 at 14:35 -0400, Paul Smith via Gdb wrote:
> There's really no need (that I can see) for ncursesw since we just
> always uses utf8 all the time for everything.

I should clarify that by this I mean, _I_ (and the folks I work with)
have no need for it in our environment: I'm not suggesting everyone
should use utf8 and no one has any need for ncursesw.

Re: Building gdb without ncursesw?

[Simon Marchi]

On 2020-10-17 6:22 p.m., Paul Smith via Gdb wrote:
> On Sat, 2020-10-17 at 14:35 -0400, Paul Smith via Gdb wrote:
>> There's really no need (that I can see) for ncursesw since we just
>> always uses utf8 all the time for everything.
>
> I should clarify that by this I mean, _I_ (and the folks I work with)
> have no need for it in our environment: I'm not suggesting everyone
> should use utf8 and no one has any need for ncursesw.

Looking at configure.ac, the library is chosen using this line:

  AC_SEARCH_LIBS(waddstr, [ncursesw ncurses cursesX curses])

Then, looking at my config.cache, I see this line:

  ac_cv_search_waddstr=${ac_cv_search_waddstr=-lncursesw}

So I suppose that if you pass ac_cv_search_waddstr=-lncurses to
configure, it will just use that instead of probing.

Simon

Re: Building gdb without ncursesw?

[Paul Smith]

On Mon, 2020-10-19 at 10:21 -0400, Simon Marchi wrote:
> On 2020-10-17 6:22 p.m., Paul Smith via Gdb wrote:
> > On Sat, 2020-10-17 at 14:35 -0400, Paul Smith via Gdb wrote:
> > > There's really no need (that I can see) for ncursesw since we
> > > just always uses utf8 all the time for everything.
> 
> Looking at configure.ac, the library is chosen using this line:
> 
>   AC_SEARCH_LIBS(waddstr, [ncursesw ncurses cursesX curses])
> 
> Then, looking at my config.cache, I see this line:
> 
>   ac_cv_search_waddstr=${ac_cv_search_waddstr=-lncursesw}
> 
> So I suppose that if you pass ac_cv_search_waddstr=-lncurses to
> configure, it will just use that instead of probing.

Seems a bit dodgy.  Also, there are other places where ncursesw is
checked before ncurses:

  AC_SEARCH_LIBS(tgetent, [termcap tinfow tinfo curses ncursesw ncurses])
    ...
  AC_CHECK_HEADERS(curses.h cursesX.h ncurses.h ncursesw/ncurses.h ncurses/ncurses.h ncurses/term.h)

For my system luckily I don't need tgetent.  And, I'm not 100% sure if
the HAVE_NCURSESW_* config options will be set properly in this
situation.

It would be nice if there were a configure option to either ignore
ncursesw, or else to specifically set the library and headers location.

Oh well, I will hack at it; thanks!