On 2009-09-19 02:31 +0200, Clint Adams wrote: > Are there any current plans to drop the wide packages and make the main > packages wide?
No. This is the idea for libncurses6, but an ncurses soname change is not imminent. One year ago the then-maintainer had announced it¹, but he did not pursue this goal any further. In any case, such a step should probably be coordinated with other distros, since the LSB demands that 5 be the soname of libncurses². Making the main packages wide without an soname change is obviously only possible if the wide library is ABI-compatible with the narrow one. The INSTALL file warns ,---- | The wide-character library interfaces are not binary-compatible with the | non-wide-character version. `---- and ,---- | NOTE: applications compiled with this³ configuration are not compatible | with those built for 8-bit characters. You cannot simply make a | symbolic link to equate libncurses.so with libncursesw.so `---- I'm not sure if this is actually true, however. When I did # ln -f /lib/libncursesw.so.5.7 /lib/libncurses.so.5.7 in a chroot, at least bash and emacs22-nox worked apparently fine. But even if there's no problem in this regard and we can get away with overriding upstream's decision of putting a "w" into the wide libraries' sonames, there is the problem that we would lose binary compatibility with everyone else in the world: programs built on Debian that use the wide API and link against our wide libncurses.so.5 would not be able to run anywhere else. The other possibility that I see is to deprecate the main packages and provide compatibility symlinks in the wide development packages so that we can binNMU the world (well, only a few hundred packages) afterwards. We would still need to ship a libncurses5 package for LSB compatibility and for proprietary applications that link against it, but there could not be a development package for the non-wide library (I would see that as a blessing). Sven ¹ http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/09/msg00435.html ² http://refspecs.linux-foundation.org/LSB_4.0.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-generic/libncurses.html ³ i.e. with --enable-widec -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
