Re: the usage of nano-tiny, and a patch for 3.2

[Benno Schulenberg]

Hi Jordi,

Op 30-01-2020 om 00:49 schreef Jordi Mallach:
> El dv. 24 de 01 de 2020 a les 13:40 +0100, en/na Benno Schulenberg va 
> escriure:
>> Yesterday I found another bug that occurs when a nano built with Slang has 
>> returned from suspension: ^C no longer works.  This seems to be a bug in 
>> Slang and thus unfixable.

It may be a deficiency in Slang's curses emulation, but nano can avoid it
by calling a terminal-initialization routine. [1]  So this problem will
no longer be present in version 4.8.

[1] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/nano.git/commit/?id=c09e96f2

>> It has been visible in nano since version 2.2.0 from ten years ago.  This 
>> made me wonder: does it really make sense to support Slang when it has so 
>> many bugs?
> 
> Not really, in fact I assume you keep Slang support because us.

Indeed.  The only reason I haven't removed support for Slang some three
years ago is because you still wanted it for Debian, for the installer.

> I'll try to get cdebconf to use ncurses.

That would be great.  :)

>> Seeing that the initrd contains 2.5 MB for brltty, surely a mere 160K can
>> be added to get a fully functional nano?
> 
> At this point in time, surely yes. 10 or 15 years ago, there were install 
> scenarios where any extra KB increase would break installs in stuff like 
> Pentium Pros and stuff like this. ;)

In fact, switching from Slang to ncurses would reduce the memory usage.
Over the years, libslang has grown a lot in size (mostly, I think, because
Debian no longer bothers to build a minimized version, with all unneeded
stuff ripped out), but ncurses has not.  Libslang takes up 1350K nowadays,
and the basic libncurses 160K.


By the way, because resizing the window does not work properly with Slang,
I have restricted the use of the --with-slang configure option: it can now
be used only together with --enable-tiny. [2]  This should be fine, as you
yourself suggested three and a half years ago. [3]

[2] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/nano.git/commit/?id=2867f1bb

[3] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/nano-devel/2016-08/msg00068.html

Regards,

Benno

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