Ncurses-6.5-20250809

Installation of Ncurses

Prepare Ncurses for compilation:

./configure --prefix=/usr           \
            --mandir=/usr/share/man \
            --with-shared           \
            --without-debug         \
            --without-normal        \
            --with-cxx-shared       \
            --enable-pc-files       \
            --with-pkg-config-libdir=/usr/lib/pkgconfig

Compile the package:

make

This package has a test suite, but it can only be run after the package has been installed. The tests reside in the test/ directory. See the README file in that directory for further details.

The installation of this package will overwrite libncursesw.so.6.5 in-place. It may crash the shell process which is using code and data from the library file. Install the package with DESTDIR, and replace the library file correctly using the --remove-destination option of cp (the header curses.h is also edited to ensure the wide-character ABI to be used as what we've done in the section called “Ncurses-6.5-20250809”):

make DESTDIR=$PWD/dest install
sed -e 's/^#if.*XOPEN.*$/#if 1/' \
    -i dest/usr/include/curses.h
cp --remove-destination -av dest/* /

Many applications still expect the linker to be able to find non-wide-character Ncurses libraries. Trick such applications into linking with wide-character libraries by means of symlinks (note that the .so links are only safe with curses.h edited to always use the wide-character ABI):

for lib in ncurses form panel menu ; do
    ln -sfv lib${lib}w.so /usr/lib/lib${lib}.so
    ln -sfv ${lib}w.pc    /usr/lib/pkgconfig/${lib}.pc
done

Finally, make sure that old applications that look for -lcurses at build time are still buildable:

ln -sfv libncursesw.so /usr/lib/libcurses.so

If desired, install the Ncurses documentation:

cp -v -R doc -T /usr/share/doc/ncurses-6.5-20250809

Note

The instructions above don't create non-wide-character Ncurses libraries since no package installed by compiling from sources would link against them at runtime. However, the only known binary-only applications that link against non-wide-character Ncurses libraries require version 5. If you must have such libraries because of some binary-only application or to be compliant with LSB, build the package again with the following commands:

make distclean
./configure --prefix=/usr    \
            --with-shared    \
            --without-normal \
            --without-debug  \
            --without-cxx-binding \
            --with-abi-version=5
make sources libs
cp -av lib/lib*.so.5* /usr/lib