ncurses-5.5 make failures for PASE (derived from AIX 5.3)

[Nicholas Campion]

I am attempting to compile ncurses 5.5 on PASE.  Many people are not
familiar with PASE, but it is an IBM iSeries operating system that is,
in most respects, identical to AIX.  I am running on a i5/OS (formerly
OS/400) version V5R4 and i have found that PASE is compatiable with
AIX 5.3.  On October 10 of 2003, you have a thread that describes the
exact problem that I am having titled "AIX compilation problem."  In
this thread the user comments that compilation and making with no
./configure option completes successfully, but the resulting programs
(i.e, ./test/ncurses) execute and return all gibberish.  This is
exactly what happens to me, except im using version 5.5 of ncurse and
that poster was using 5.3.  After the main menu, where i can clearly
see a list of options, any and all options result in a string of
garbage beind displayed on the console.  You suggested to the original
poster that they try "--with-caps=aix4" which I tried.  The compile
still complete's fine, but the make fails with the error:

> ../ncurses/comp_captab.c:3018: #error --> term.h and
> comp_captab.c disagree
> about the <--
> ../ncurses/comp_captab.c:3019: #error --> numbers of booleans, numbers
> and/or strings <--
> make: 1254-004 The error code from the last command is 1.
>
>
> Stop.
> make: 1254-004 The error code from the last command is 2.

The poster then applied a patch to ncurses (patch-5.3-XXXXXXXX) and
their error goes away.  I have tried to patch the current version of
ncurses 5.5, using patch ncurses-5.5-20060128.sh, but the patch says
that "unable to find the patch anywhere."  Upon examining the patch
file, I don't seem to be able to understand what is happening.  Would
this even make a difference, and why would an error that existed in
5.3 and was patched, show up again?  Thanks for any help you can
offer.

Nick