Problems with ncurses-5.4

[Matt Emmerton]

I'm one of the developers of LifeLines (lifelines.sourceforge.net), a
genealogy program that uses ncurses.

Lately, bunch of distributions that we support have upgraded to ncurses-5.4,
and our code no longer runs as we get segfaults inside of ncurses while
calling initscr(), such as this one:

#0  0x049e1340 in _nc_unicode_locale () at
../../ncurses/tinfo/lib_setup.c:361
#1  0x049e0279 in _nc_init_acs () at ../../ncurses/tinfo/lib_acs.c:119
#2  0x049d07c4 in _nc_setupscreen (slines=24, scolumns=80, output=0x8605c0)
at ../../ncurses/base/lib_set_term.c:388
#3  0x049cdf10 in newterm (name=0x0, ofp=0x8605c0, ifp=0x860720) at
../../ncurses/base/lib_newterm.c:146
#4  0x049cabff in initscr () at ../../ncurses/base/lib_initscr.c:83
#5  0x08053817 in main (argc=1, argv=0xfeff4ac4) at main.c:624

The various distributions and versions of ncurses that we've experimented
with are as follows:

Mandrake 10.1:    5.4.20040208 / WORKING (sources from gnu.org)
Debian-stable:    5.4.20040320 / WORKING
Mandrake 10.1:    5.4.20040529 / BROKEN (RPMs that ship with Mandrake)
RH Fedora Core 3:    5.4.20040724 / BROKEN

It would appear that something changed between March and May of 2004 that is
causing bad things to happen, but I've gone through the code and the vendor
patch sets and can't seem to find anything obvious.

One thing that we have found is that a simple test program containing one
object file that links with ncurses works fine, but as soon as a second
object is linked, we get segfaults.  We've also had mixed results linking
with a static ncurses versus a dynamic ncurses.  Puzzling to say the
least -- especially since these three distributions are using different
combinatons of gcc and bintools.

Has anyone seen this before?  Does anyone have any ideas/advise to help us
debug this further?

Thanks,

--
Matt Emmerton