WIP: Combine libtinfo with libncurses

[jakirkham]

Needs #12 and #11 to be merged first.

Fixes #9

Some users expect to find all of libtinfo's symbols in libncurses. While not all builds of libncurses do this and the trend has been to have a separate libtinfo, this puts them back together in the same library. However, it does provides symlinks named after the libtinfo libraries that point back to libncurses. This way programs that expect to link to libtinfo still can, but will get those symbols from libncurses. Part of the reason this has been opted for is defaults does the same thing. We have included some tests to verify that some of the libtinfo symbols are in libncurses, which should be sufficient in verifying this works.

After this is merged, anything built with ncurses support is going to have to be rebuilt as this will break those packages. Currently, that is just erlang, which needs to be pinned anyways ( conda-forge/erlang-feedstock#5 ). Though it would be good to get this in before our own python is released so that we will have some time to test this new configuration with that build and release it using this new configuration. Thus, this is a good time to make this break if we are going to do it.

xref: bioconda/bioconda-recipes#1391

cc @pelson @ocefpaf @msarahan @jjhelmus @scopatz @cel4 @croth1 @johanneskoester

[conda-forge-linter]

Hi! This is the friendly automated conda-forge-linting service.

I just wanted to let you know that I linted all conda-recipes in your PR (recipe) and found it was in an excellent condition.

[jakirkham]

Need to have the right library extension for each platform.

[jakirkham]

Should add that we welcome other maintainers on board this feedstock (as with the whole ecosystem). As this seems important to bioconda, maybe it would be good to have a few of your people on board. 🚢 Please let us know if you are interested, we are always happy to have other people join us. 😄

[jakirkham]

Rebased on top of this PR ( #11 ) to provide pkg-config support.

[jakirkham]

This seems like it should work ok, but I would like someone to confirm that it works for them.

Also, I have tried very hard to ensure that from a build standpoint everything will still behave correctly whether or not one expects a separate tinfo. However, I may not have caught all such cases and would appreciate careful eyes looking for any such missing thing.

Even though we want this to be fine from a build standpoint, it will be a breaking change from the runtime standpoint. As a result, anything that is already built with ncurses will be broken and need to be rebuilt with an ncurses that includes this change.

Finally, it seems that the ncurses devs have been pushing for these to be two separate libraries (libncurses and libtinfo). Most Linux distros provide them as two separate libraries. Mac, which has a very old version of ncurses, provides them as one. While we can push them together into libncurses, it feels like a step backwards and it is unclear how long that behavior will be supported. It seems more reasonable that packages expecting this behavior get updated to handle the fact that these libraries may be separate. Adding support for pkg-config ( #11 ) will make that easier.

That being said, I don't have very strong feelings against this, but am just a little wary. If this is very desirable behavior from the community perspective, I'm willing to discuss this. Hence why I have generated a PR that implements behavior so we can discuss it more.

[jakirkham]

I have marked this as WIP so no one accidentally merges this. However, this is really a working, tested change at this point. People are welcome to play with it if they like. We just should not merge it until much more discussion has occurred and we decide we want to go in this direction. Personally, I'm not yet convinced.

[msarahan]

+1 for following the ncurses team lead and not merging these. This might be some crappy maintenance work to add in the extra library in various makefiles, but it will be worth it, IMHO.

[jakirkham]

Agreed. Only proposing this for the convenience of downstream. If providing some pkg-config files ( #11 ) is enough, I would rather go that way and close this.

[croth1]

I am fine with keeping the status quo. Patching the Makefile and using ncurses-config and pkg-config to get the flags required for linking seems to work fine.

[jakirkham]

Dropping this options gets rid of libtinfo and combines it in with libncurses.

[pelson]

No reason from me to not do this. 👍

[jakirkham]

No reason from me to not do this. 👍

Personally, I don't love it. This seems to be opposite all of the Linux distros I have seen and is only really the same as Mac (which has an ancient copy).

Mainly, I put this together so we could see it is possible and discuss with downstream if this is something they would want. Thus far it seems like they are happy with the pkg-config additions ( #11 ) and patching Makefiles in some things that require ncurses to find libtinfo.

Honestly, I would be in favor of closing. Especially as it looks like they now don't need it.