Re: [bug-ncurses] ncurses 6.0 and cur_term function

[Dr. Werner Fink]

On Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 08:08:54PM -0400, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 12:12:04PM +0200, Dr. Werner Fink wrote:
> > 
> > Just my two cents worth I had the thought that starting with ABI 6 it would
> > make a lot of sense to provide noadays the ABI 6 in a threaded version only.
> > This because a lot of modern programs are required to use thread safe 
> > libraries.
> 
> Some are, but almost all of the ones that I notice (and reply to) have
> trouble using threads in C.  I don't recall more than 1-2 who have built
> ncursest/ncursestw (since few packages provide it) and written something
> useful.

Most ncurses programs here depend one wide character support noadays as
all is now in UTF-8 including my MUA.  And here there is YaST which has
a ncurses GUI which has to be thread safe.

> The purpose of ABI 6 was the colors/mouse extensions.  The thread-support
> is (like normal/wide characters) mostly independent of the ABI 5/6.  But
> unlike normal/wide, while it's arguably API-compatible, it's not
> ABI-compatible.
>  
> > I had tried also a lot of version and one was the matrix
> > 
> >        without t and without w
> >        with t and without w
> >        without t and with w
> >        with t and with t
> > 
> > for ABI 6 and similar for ABI 5 causing a lot of libraries together with
> > a lot of runtime configurations and a huge number of bug reports which
> > indeed had been done because users had lost overview (which user does
> > read manuals and/or guides) and/or had mixed the several versions out of
> > the matrix and sometime between the two ABI versions.
> 
> users don't read FAQs either (not much I can do about that...)

It would be perfect if the final libncurses could have some automatic
compile/link time options which would allow to use/have only one library
but enable the developer using (lib)ncurses thread safe by choosing
-D_REENTRANT or -D_THREAD_SAFE and/or to get wide character support
with -D_NCURSES_WIDECHAR ... don't now if this is doable.  AT least
glibc does provide this -D_REENTRANT or -D_THREAD_SAFE switch for
declaring reentrant functions.

Werner

-- 
  "Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having
          a peeing section in a swimming pool." -- Edward Burr

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