Bug 6950

Summary: Full unicode support in ncurses
Product: buildroot Reporter: prezi77
Component: OtherAssignee: Gustavo Zacarias <gustavo>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED    
Severity: normal CC: buildroot
Priority: P5    
Version: 2014.02   
Target Milestone: 2014.11   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Host: Target:
Build:

Description prezi77 2014-03-12 10:50:16 UTC
On one hand there is a general switch WIDE_CHAR but it has no influence on building ncursesw instead of ncurses. Thus there is no real unicode support for such programs like dialog.
Comment 1 Thomas De Schampheleire 2014-04-29 18:40:52 UTC
Patches for ncurses wide support have been proposed before, last version by Jeremy Kerr: http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/329289/

The topic has been discussed here too: http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2013-October/080673.html

From this discussion, I don't see a blocking problem in accepting the mentioned patch. There was some debate about the fact that ncurses allows to either build non-widechar, or widechar, but not both at the same time.
In Jeremy's patch, the user has to choose which one he wants.

An alternative solution was to create two separate packages: ncurses and ncursesw.

So according to me, we either accept Jeremy's patch (possible refreshed) or someone should implement the split package approach.

Input?
Comment 2 prezi77 2014-05-04 12:25:09 UTC
(In reply to comment #1)

> So according to me, we either accept Jeremy's patch (possible refreshed) or
> someone should implement the split package approach.
> 
I suggest you to use Jeremy's patch. It has one import advantage: it exists.
Ncurses is uses by approximately 60 packages:



alsa-utils
aumix
avrdude
bash
bmon
bwm-ng
cvs
dialog
dropwatch
erlang
gdb
gnupg
gpm
gpsd
gptfdisk
htop
httping
iftop
joe
kismet
lame
latencytop
lcdproc
less
libcdio
libedit
liboping
lua
luaposix
lvm2
minicom
mtr
mutt
mysql
nano
ncdu
ncftp
ncmpcpp
ncurses
ola
procps
proftpd
psmisc
python
python3
readline
rtorrent
ruby
screen
sqlcipher
sqlite
statserial
tmux
tn5250
uemacs
util-linux
vim
xterm
zsh

I suppose it is possible to patch makefiles to link to ncursesw. Some of them uses ncursesw natively.
Comment 3 Thomas De Schampheleire 2014-05-08 12:08:05 UTC
After discussing with Gustavo on IRC, the split package approach seems best.
Hopefully this can be finished by 2014.08 (doing this in the upcoming release 2014.05 is no longer possible.)
Comment 4 Thomas De Schampheleire 2014-08-09 09:06:19 UTC
Gustavo has sent a few patches to the list to implement the shared package approach. However, I lost track of the overall status of this.

Gustavo, could you summarize the status, and make an assessment of whether this could still be done for 2014.08 or whether we better go for -next?
Comment 5 Gustavo Zacarias 2014-08-12 20:08:43 UTC
Jeremy's patch http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/360317/ is mostly ok but it doesn't consider the static lib scenario as mentioned in the thread.

I've run an allyespackageconfig with ncursesw enabled and fixed some packages, however nano needs a patch http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/367145/ that depends on the config option being present (hence not committed yet).

I can respin Jeremy's patch if he doesn't do or just add a fix patch after his one is committed for the static libs (+nano ncursesw).

This is all pretty safe according to my tests, however the usual policy is no feature patches in release candidate (frozen) state, so i'm defering this to the 2014.11 milestone.
Comment 6 Thomas Petazzoni 2014-09-21 16:46:02 UTC
The patches from Jeremy and Gustavo have been committed: http://git.buildroot.net/buildroot/commit/?id=74efae025371fbb0540f3184c66a1fd0a3c34abd. Marking bug as fixed.