On Mon, Sep 02, 2019 at 12:32:51 +0300, Valery Ushakov wrote: > Why would we ever want to report this completely random and unrelated > fact?! > > There were years when curses in the tree was unchanged. In the mean > time we have churned through dozens of netbsd versions. > > Why are we trying to over-engineer this?
So the original claim was that it's needed by qemu. I've downloaded qemu-3.1.1, qemu-4.1.0, and qemu.git and I don't see it mentioned anywhere, grep -r curses_version qemu* returns nothing. I've searched github and I see manual pages to curses_version in various formats, binding for curses_version for various scripting languages. configure tests that seems to check the presense of curses_version to detect ncurses. NB: have we just broken all those configure scripts? I don't see this function actually being used for anything though I haven't clicked through all the 31K occurrences. I cannot really conceive how this function can be useful for anything other that printing that information as part of some banner. A program that makes some kind of decision about how to use curses by inspecting this value at runtime? I'd sooner belive in unicorns :) My preference would be to either revert this and pretend it never happened or to make it return a static string "All your base are belong to us" b/c we really don't have any meaningful versioning for our curses and pretending otherwise by returning completely unrelated netbsd version just makes us look stupid, IMO. (As Christoph noted, do we now have to bump netbsd version if we make a change in curses? :) I'm sorry I should have joined this bikeshed earlier, but as I said I didn't realize what was actually going to be committed. I'm sorry I let Roy to be mobbed into this. -uwe
