On 2016-10-15 21:28 -0400, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 09:22:56PM +0200, Sven Joachim wrote:
>> On 2016-10-11 16:34 +0200, Ailin Nemui wrote:
>>
>> > Package: libtinfo-dev
>> > Version: 6.0+20160917-1
>> >
>> > I need libtinfo.so and stumbled upon this sentence in the description.
>> > It is bad for 2 reasons - no explanation given - no suggested action.
>> >
>> > My guess is to depend on ncurses, but why if I only need tinfo?
>>
>> Because libtinfo-dev does not contain any header files, so you will need
>> libncurses5-dev (or libncursesw5-dev, but its header files are in
>> /usr/include/ncursesw, so you have to take some action to find them).
>> See the discussion in https://bugs.debian.org/644426 for some
>> background.
>
> that, plus - your comment reminds me that the reason why the headers
> are all in one place is that some of tinfo's functions are declared
> in curses.h (due to historical reasons) rather than in term.h
It would seem desirable to change that, but it might cause a few FTBFS
bugs for programs which #include only curses.h but not term.h.
> If there were a cleaner separation between the headers,
> it would have been more feasible to make a separate package.
I guess that's not going to happen anytime soon. Anyway, my plan for
the Debian package is to provide only one set of headers (Fedora has
been doing this for many years) and merge the three -dev packages
into a single libncurses-dev package.
Cheers,
Sven
