[lsb-discuss] LSB question: ncursesw

[Wichmann, Mats D]

>Currently Debian ships gnu ncurses 5.5 and has separate 
>libncurses5 and libncursew5 packages. libncursesw5 has
>~30 packages in unstable that depend on it, libncurses5 has ~680.
>
>I asked the Debian maintainer and he said that he intends to 
>have the normal libncurses5 package configured with the wide 
>stuff in and then drop the separate libncursesw5 package. 
>So adding a separate "libncursew5.so.5" might not be a good
>idea. If all the distros agree to do the same, then maybe 
>the additional requirements can just be added to the existing 
>libncurses in the spec. That would be nice.

It would be binary incompatible with the current library,
so it's not going to be .so.5 any more in that case:

"If you configure using the --enable-widec option, a "w" is appended to
the
library names (e.g., libncursesw.a), and the resulting libraries support
wide-characters, e.g., via a UTF-8 locale.  The corresponding header
files
are compatible with the non-wide-character configuration; wide-character
features are provided by ifdef's in the header files.  The
wide-character
library interfaces are not binary-compatible with the non-wide-character
version."

But overall, I agree it would be nicer to move in the
direction of having "internationalization" mainline instead
of being some kind of bolt-on, which having a second version
of the same library, configured a different way, clearly is.

On the other hand, if we end up with Debian doing it one
way and others a different way that's not so nice.

Thanks for the research...

Any other distros want to weigh in on this topic?