On 2016-09-20 21:45 +0300, Kirill Smelkov wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 20, 2016 at 08:05:00PM +0200, Sven Joachim wrote:
>> Many of those are already enabled by default if you configure
>> --with-abi-version=6, see the INSTALL file. Unfortunately, we cannot
>> change the ABI before the release of Debian 9, but I definitely want to
>> do it after the Stretch release.
>
> Thanks for feedback and info about --with-abi-version=... .
>
> I see about ABI change and stretch release though just wondering: with
> introduction of libncurses6* which will be there along with currently
> present libncurses5* we are not changing ABI for libncurses5 and thus
> all packages which already use libncurses won't be affected before
> explicit change to their build-depends from libncurses5-dev to
> libncurses6-dev to them.
There is no plan to introduce libncurses6-dev since the API hasn't
changed. Also, the transition should happen via binNMUs, without the
need to change source packages.
> I mean even if we add libncurses6* packages keeping libncurses5* in
> place there also, it won't break anything. Does this maybe change
> something about the time when libncurses6 can be introduced?
Not really, the problem is that ncurses in Jessie does not provide
versioned symbols, and we are supposed to support partial upgrades
without programs going down in flames when they have loaded both
libncurses.so.5 and libncurses.so.6 in their address space. There are
quite a few libraries in Debian which depend on libncurses5 or
libncursesw5, so this is not an hypothetical problem.
Sorry for the bad news, but this bug has been open for over twelve
years, it can wait a few more months.
If you would like to discuss which features should be enabled in the
future ncurses6 packages, that's certainly welcome. I haven't started
working on those yet, but with the freeze approaching it's about time to
make a new git branch in our repository. :-)
Cheers,
Sven
