Re: bash will not link against ncursesw and readline in /usr/local

[Chet Ramey]

On 11/14/18 1:07 AM, John Frankish wrote:
>>> Using bash-4.4.18
>>> Intel core i7 laptop running 32-bit or 64-bit linux Using gcc-8.2.0
>>>
>>> The configure script does not find libncursesw on a system where
>>> only the wide version of ncurses exists  - even when readine is linked 
>>> against ncursesw.
>>>
>> I haven't seen a distro where ncursesw is installed without a link to 
>> ncurses.
>> Which distribution are you using?
>>
> The 64-bit version of tinycorelinux - all non-base packages are installed to 
> /usr/local.
> Since ncursesw is now the default, I'm trying to compile against that.
> 
>> I could add a check for ncursesw, but that's the kind of thing the distro 
>> usually does.
>>
> If ncursesw is now the default, maybe it would make sense to check for that 
> rather than a symlink?

What does "the default" mean in a multi-distro context? And readline
doesn't check for "a symlink"; it checks for ncurses.

>> I don't have any trouble finding readline in /usr/local/lib/libreadline.so 
>> after
>> installing it, editing /etc/ld.so.conf, and running ldconfig. I tried with 
>> readline-8.0-beta
>> and bash-5.0-beta, so at least it will be working when those hit release 
>> status.
>>
> It appears that the readline check relies on the ncurses check being 
> successful.
> 
> If I configure without an ncurses symlink the check for readline fails.

Yes, readline requires curses/ncurses to work. You can't have readline and
line editing without it.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/