Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Johnson <[email protected]> · Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:42:52 -0500

Hi Matthieu,

On Tuesday 29 September 2009 09:45:59 you wrote:
>
> That surpised me because I don't recall anything in base that has curses
> like features or interface. Rebuilding base without those flags actually
> succeeds.

Linking against libcurses or libncurses is a requirement on some versions of 
Linux when linking with the GNU readline library which is used for command-
line editing support.  I just compiled Base twice with -lncurses removed; on 
my Fedora Core 8 system it built with no problems, but on a Fedora Core 6 box 
I get these errors without it:

/usr/lib/libreadline.so.5: undefined reference to `PC'
/usr/lib/libreadline.so.5: undefined reference to `tgetflag'
/usr/lib/libreadline.so.5: undefined reference to `tgetent'
/usr/lib/libreadline.so.5: undefined reference to `UP'
/usr/lib/libreadline.so.5: undefined reference to `tputs'
/usr/lib/libreadline.so.5: undefined reference to `tgoto'
/usr/lib/libreadline.so.5: undefined reference to `tgetnum'
/usr/lib/libreadline.so.5: undefined reference to `BC'
/usr/lib/libreadline.so.5: undefined reference to `tgetstr'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

If Base builds without any problems on your system without linking to either 
curses library then that's great and you can obviously do without it, but some 
(older) Linux systems do need it.

We obviously need to provide more options for the COMMANDLINE_LIBRARY setting 
on Linux to select whether to link with libcurses, libncurses or neither.  
It's probably safe nowadays to assume that all Linux distributions will come 
with libreadline though.  I'm going to make some changes and put these lines 
into the file configure/os/CONFIG_SITE.Common.linuxCommon for the next 
release:

# Depending on your version of Linux you'll want one of the following
# lines to enable command-line editing and history support
COMMANDLINE_LIBRARY = READLINE
#COMMANDLINE_LIBRARY = READLINE_NCURSES
#COMMANDLINE_LIBRARY = READLINE_CURSES

HTH,

- Andrew
-- 
The best FOSS code is written to be read by other humans -- Harald Welte

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System