Re: ABI problems in ncurses-5.5

[Stanislav Ievlev]

On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 10:27:41AM -0400, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> > breaks user's code. 
> > If you want to support a some legacy compillers, it's better to create
> > new configure switch to select generation between inlines or macros.
> 
> hmm - there are a lot of define's in ncurses's headers.  Can you be more
> specific?  Perhaps you're referring to this:
> 
> #ifndef NCURSES_INLINE
> #define NCURSES_INLINE @NCURSES_INLINE@
> #endif
> 
> which I regarded as relatively harmless (using the configure-script's
> substitutions to add a name specific to ncurses in curses.h rather than
> add a new file to hold substitutions for internal use).  It's only referenced
> internally...
> 
> Since I'd been sticking to the rule of adding ncurses-specific names
> as "NCURSES_XXX" or "_ncu_XXX", it didn't seem likely to break anything
> that took that rule into account.
I've said about definitions like addch.
A definition like this can break c++ classes with a method called "addch",
or my own addch functions in a different c++ namespace.

It's too hard to detect such problems.