Re: Do we want versioned symbols in ncurses?

[Maxime Devos]

B. Wilson schreef op di 12-04-2022 om 12:04 [+0900]:
> Hey Guix,
> 
> Is there any particular reason why our current ncurses packages builds without
> versioned symbols? Upstream specifies only default versions (i.e. via @@), no
> forced ones, so IIUC that should make the library drop-in replaceable for
> everything we have so far. Am I missing something?
> 
> Building with symbols is easy enough: just configure 
> --with-versioned-syms=yes.
> 
> I ran into this after encountering a project that explicitly uses ncurses
> symbol versions. It is simple enough to carry a custom ncurses in my personal
> channel for this, but if possible I thought it would be cool to have it in the
> main one.
> 
> Thoughts?

Debian has identifier some potential problems, quoted from
<https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=788610#5>:

> When using this option, quite a lot of internal symbols which are not
> part of the API are no longer exported, see the attached list.
> Fortunately according to codesearch.debian.net, very few packages
> seem
> to use any of those symbols:
> 
>  - fpc, in fpcsrc/packages/ncurses/src/form.pp, apparently declares
>    _nc_Default_Form and _nc_Default_Field.  Probably nobody really
>    uses those, but I don't really have a clue of Pascal.
> 
>  - cmake has a lot of hits since it includes a very outdated copy of
>    the form library which is apparently unused.  The /usr/bin/ccmake
>    binary from the cmake-curses-gui package is linked with the system
>    form library and does not use any private symbols from it.
> 
>  - libncursesada and haskell_ncurses declare _nc_has_mouse, but only
>    if NCURSES_VERSION_PATCH < 20081122.  Prior to that date,
>    _nc_has_mouse was actually part of the API so its removal might
>    break some old programs.  This might be a case where the symbol
>    should actually be exported in order not to break the ABI.

We'll have to investigate if this is also a potential problem here.

Greetings,
Maxime.

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