/
githubmirror
/
ncurses
Обзор
Документация
Войти
/
githubmirror
/
ncurses
Код
Запросы
0
Пакеты
0
Релизы
0
Аналитика
Безопасность
v5.1
INSTALL
989 строк
41 KB
Thomas E. Dickey
ncurses 5.1
09 июл 2000, 06:46
09 июл 2000, 06:46
b1f61d9
Код
Авторство
О чём код?
-- $Id: INSTALL,v 1.38 2000/07/08 22:46:08 tom Exp $ --------------------------------------------------------------------- How to install Ncurses/Terminfo on your system --------------------------------------------------------------------- ************************************************************ * READ ALL OF THIS FILE BEFORE YOU TRY TO INSTALL NCURSES. * ************************************************************ You should be reading the file INSTALL in a directory called ncurses-d.d, where d.d is the current version number. There should be several subdirectories, including `c++', `form', `man', `menu', 'misc', `ncurses', `panel', `progs', and `test'. See the README file for a roadmap to the package. If you are a Linux or FreeBSD or NetBSD distribution integrator or packager, please read and act on the section titled IF YOU ARE A SYSTEM INTEGRATOR below. If you are converting from BSD curses and do not have root access, be sure to read the BSD CONVERSION NOTES section below. If you are using a version of XFree86 xterm older than 3.1.2F, see the section on RECENT XTERM VERSIONS below. If you are trying to build GNU Emacs using ncurses for terminal support, read the USING NCURSES WITH EMACS section below. If you are trying to build applications using gpm with ncurses, read the USING NCURSES WITH GPM section below. If you are running over the Andrew File System see the note below on USING NCURSES WITH AFS. If you want to build the Ada95 binding, go to the Ada95 directory and follow the instructions there. The Ada95 binding is not covered below. If you are using anything but (a) Linux, or (b) one of the 4.4BSD-based i386 Unixes, go read the Portability section in the TO-DO file before you do anything else. REQUIREMENTS: ------------ You will need the following in order to build and install ncurses under UNIX: * ANSI C compiler (gcc is recommended) * sh (bash will do) * awk (mawk or gawk will do) * sed * BSD or System V style install (a script is enclosed) Ncurses has been also built in the OS/2 EMX environment. INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: ---------------------- 1. First, decide whether you want ncurses to replace your existing library (in which case you'll need super-user privileges) or be installed in parallel with it. The --prefix option to configure changes the root directory for installing ncurses. The default is in subdirectories of /usr/local. Use --prefix=/usr to replace your default curses distribution. This is the default for Linux and BSD/OS users. The package gets installed beneath the --prefix directory as follows: In $(prefix)/bin: tic, infocmp, captoinfo, tset, reset, clear, tput, toe In $(prefix)/lib: libncurses*.* libcurses.a In $(prefix)/share/terminfo: compiled terminal descriptions In $(prefix)/include: C header files Under $(prefix)/man: the manual pages Note however that the configure script attempts to locate previous installation of ncurses, and will set the default prefix according to where it finds the ncurses headers. 2. Type `./configure' in the top-level directory of the distribution to configure ncurses for your operating system and create the Makefiles. Besides --prefix, various configuration options are available to customize the installation; use `./configure --help' to list the available options. If your operating system is not supported, read the PORTABILITY section in the file ncurses/README for information on how to create a configuration file for your system. The `configure' script generates makefile rules for one or more object models and their associated libraries: libncurses.a (normal) libcurses.a (normal, a link to libncurses.a) This gets left out if you configure with --disable-overwrite. libncurses.so (shared) libncurses_g.a (debug) libncurses_p.a (profile) If you do not specify any models, the normal and debug libraries will be configured. Typing `configure' with no arguments is equivalent to: ./configure --with-normal --with-debug --enable-overwrite Typing ./configure --with-shared makes the shared libraries the default, resulting in ./configure --with-shared --with-normal --with-debug --enable-overwrite If you want only shared libraries, type ./configure --with-shared --without-normal --without-debug Rules for generating shared libraries are highly dependent upon the choice of host system and compiler. We've been testing shared libraries on Linux and SunOS with gcc, but more work needs to be done to make shared libraries work on other systems. You can make curses and terminfo fall back to an existing file of termcap definitions by configuring with --enable-termcap. If you do this, the library will search /etc/termcap before the terminfo database, and will also interpret the contents of the TERM environment variable. See the section BSD CONVERSION NOTES below. 3. Type `make'. Ignore any warnings, no error messages should be produced. This should compile the ncurses library, the terminfo compiler tic(1), captoinfo(1), infocmp(1), toe(1), clear(1) tset(1), reset(1), and tput(1) programs (see the manual pages for explanation of what they do), some test programs, and the panels, menus, and forms libraries. 4. Run ncurses and several other test programs in the test directory to verify that ncurses functions correctly before doing an install that may overwrite system files. Read the file test/README for details on the test programs. NOTE: You must have installed the terminfo database, or set the environment variable $TERMINFO to point to a SVr4-compatible terminfo database before running the test programs. Not all vendors' terminfo databases are SVr4-compatible, but most seem to be. Exceptions include DEC's Digital Unix (formerly known as OSF/1). The ncurses program is designed specifically to test the ncurses library. You can use it to verify that the screen highlights work correctly, that cursor addressing and window scrolling works OK, etc. 5. Once you've tested, you can type `make install' to install libraries, the programs, the terminfo database and the manual pages. Alternately, you can type `make install' in each directory you want to install. In the top-level directory, you can do a partial install using these commands: 'make install.progs' installs tic, infocmp, etc... 'make install.includes' installs the headers. 'make install.libs' installs the libraries (and the headers). 'make install.data' installs the terminfo data. (Note: `tic' must be installed before the terminfo data can be compiled). 'make install.man' installs the manual pages. ############################################################################ # CAVEAT EMPTOR: `install.data' run as root will NUKE any existing # # terminfo database. If you have any custom or unusual entries SAVE them # # before you install ncurses. I have a file called terminfo.custom for # # this purpose. Don't forget to run tic on the file once you're done. # ############################################################################ The terminfo(5) manual page must be preprocessed with tbl(1) before being formatted by nroff(1). Modern man(1) implementations tend to do this by default, but you may want to look at your version's manual page to be sure. If the system already has a curses library that you need to keep using for some bizarre binary-compatibility reason, you'll need to distinguish between it and ncurses. If ncurses is installed outside the standard directories (/usr/include and /usr/lib) then all your users will need to use the -I option to compile programs and -L to link them. If you have BSD curses installed in your system and you accidentally compile using its curses.h you'll end up with a large number of undefined symbols at link time. _waddbytes is one of them. IF YOU DO NOT HAVE ROOT: Change directory to the `progs' subdirectory and run the `capconvert' script. This script will deduce various things about your environment and use them to build you a private terminfo tree, so you can use ncurses applications. If more than one user at your site does this, the space for the duplicate trees is wasted. Try to get your site administrators to install a system- wide terminfo tree instead. See the BSD CONVERSION NOTES section below for a few more details. 6. The c++ directory has C++ classes that are built on top of ncurses and panels. You must have c++ (and its libraries) installed before you can compile and run the demo. Use --without-cxx-binding to tell configure to not build the C++ bindings and demo. If you do not have C++, you must use the --without-cxx option to tell the configure script to not attempt to determine the type of 'bool' which may be supported by C++. IF YOU USE THIS OPTION, BE ADVISED THAT YOU MAY NOT BE ABLE TO COMPILE (OR RUN) NCURSES APPLICATIONS WITH C++. 7. If you're running an older Linux, you must either (a) tell Linux that the console terminal type is `linux' or (b) make a link to or copy of the linux entry in the appropriate place under your terminfo directory, named `console'. All 1.3 and many 1.2 distributions (including Yggdrasil and Red Hat) already have the console type set to `linux'. The way to change the wired-in console type depends on the configuration of your system. This may involve editing /etc/inittab, /etc/ttytype, /etc/profile and other such files. Warning: this is not for the fainthearted, if you mess up your console getty entries you can make your system unusable! However, if you are a distribution maker, this is the right thing to do (see the note for integrators near the end of this file). The easier way is to link or copy l/linux to c/console under your terminfo directory. Note: this will go away next time you do `make install.data' and you'll have to redo it. There is no need to have entries for all possible screen sizes, ncurses will figure out the size automatically. SUMMARY OF CONFIGURE OPTIONS: ---------------------------- The configure script provides a short list of its options when you type ./configure --help The --help and several options are common to all configure scripts that are generated with autoconf. Those are all listed before the line --enable and --with options recognized: The other options are specific to this package. We list them in alphabetic order. --disable-big-core Assume machine has little memory. The configure script attempts to determine if your machine has enough memory (about 6Mb) to compile the terminfo database without writing portions to disk. Some allocators return deceptive results, so you may have to override the configure script. Or you may be building tic for a smaller machine. --disable-database Use only built-in data. The ncurses libraries normally read terminfo and termcap data from disk. You can configure ncurses to have a built-in database, aka "fallback" entries. Embedded applications may have no need for an external database. --disable-ext-funcs Disable function-extensions. Configure ncurses without the functions that are not specified by XSI. See ncurses/modules for the exact list of library modules that would be suppressed. --disable-leaks For testing, compile-in code that frees memory that normally would not be freed, to simplify analysis of memory-leaks. --disable-macros For testing, use functions rather than macros. The program will run more slowly, but it is simpler to debug. This makes a header file "nomacros.h". See also the --enable-expanded option. --disable-overwrite If you are installing ncurses on a system which contains another development version of curses, or which could be confused by the loader for another version, we recommend that you leave out the link to -lcurses. The ncurses library is always available as -lncurses. Disabling overwrite also causes the ncurses header files to be installed into a subdirectory, e.g., /usr/local/include/ncurses, rather than the include directory. This makes it simpler to avoid compile-time conflicts with other versions of curses.h --disable-scroll-hints Compile without scroll-hints code. This option is ignored when hashmap scrolling is configured, which is the default. --enable-add-ons=DIR... This is used to check if this package is a glibc add-on. This is used only by the glibc makefiles. --enable-assertions For testing, compile-in assertion code. This is used only for a few places where ncurses cannot easily recover by returning an error code. --enable-broken_linker A few platforms have what we consider a broken linker: it cannot link objects from an archive solely by referring to data objects in those files, but requires a function reference. This configure option changes several data references to functions to work around this problem. NOTE: With ncurses 5.1, this may not be necessary, since we are told that some linkers interpret uninitialized global data as a different type of reference which behaves as described above. We have explicitly initialized all of the global data to work around the problem. --enable-bsdpad Recognize BSD-style prefix padding. Some ancient BSD programs (such as nethack) call tputs("50") to implement delays. --enable-colorfgbg Compile with experimental $COLORFGBG code. That environment variable is set by some terminal emulators as a hint to applications, by advertising the default foreground and background colors. During initialization, ncurses sets color pair 0 to match this. --enable-const The curses interface as documented in XSI is rather old, in fact including features that precede ANSI C. The prototypes generally do not make effective use of "const". When using stricter compilers (or gcc with appropriate warnings), you may see warnings about the mismatch between const and non-const data. We provide a configure option which changes the interfaces to use const - quieting these warnings and reflecting the actual use of the parameters more closely. The ncurses library uses the symbol NCURSES_CONST for these instances of const, and if you have asked for compiler warnings, will add gcc's const-qual warning. There will still be warnings due to subtle inconsistencies in the interface, but at a lower level. NOTE: configuring ncurses with this option may detract from the portability of your applications by encouraging you to use const in places where the XSI curses interface would not allow them. Similar issues arise when porting to SVr4 curses, which uses const in even fewer places. --enable-echo Use the option --disable-echo to make the build-log less verbose by suppressing the display of the compile and link commands. This makes it easier to see the compiler warnings. (You can always use "make -n" to see the options that are used). --enable-expanded For testing, generate functions for certain macros to make them visible as such to the debugger. See also the --disable-macros option. --enable-getcap Use the 4.4BSD getcap code if available, or a bundled version of it to fetch termcap entries. Entries read in this way cannot use (make cross-references to) the terminfo tree, but it is faster than reading /etc/termcap. --enable-getcap-cache Cache translated termcaps under the directory $HOME/.terminfo NOTE: this sounds good - it makes ncurses run faster the second time. But look where the data comes from - an /etc/termcap containing lots of entries that are not up to date. If you configure with this option and forget to install the terminfo database before running an ncurses application, you will end up with a hidden terminfo database that generally does not support color and will miss some function keys. --enable-hard-tabs Compile-in cursor-optimization code that uses hard-tabs. We would make this a standard feature except for the concern that the terminfo entry may not be accurate, or that your stty settings have disabled the use of tabs. --enable-hashmap Compile with hashmap scrolling-optimization code. This is the default, replacing an older scrolling-hints algorithm. --enable-no-padding Compile-in support for the $NCURSES_NO_PADDING environment variable, which allows you to suppress the effect of non-mandatory padding in terminfo entries. This is the default, unless you have disabled the extended functions. --enable-rpath Use rpath option when generating shared libraries. This applies mainly to systems using the GNU linker (read the manpage). --enable-safe-sprintf Compile with experimental safe-sprintf code. You may consider using this if you are building ncurses for a system that has neither vsnprintf() or vsprintf(). It is slow, however. --enable-sigwinch Compile support for ncurses' SIGWINCH handler. If your application has its own SIGWINCH handler, ncurses will not use its own. The ncurses handler causes wgetch() to return KEY_RESIZE when the screen-size changes. This option is the default, unless you have disabled the extended functions. --enable-symlinks If your system supports symbolic links, make tic use symbolic links rather than hard links to save diskspace when writing aliases in the terminfo database. --enable-tcap-names Compile-in support for user-definable terminal capabilities. Use the -x option of tic and infocmp to treat unrecognized terminal capabilities as user-defined strings. This option is the default, unless you have disabled the extended functions. --enable-termcap Compile in support for reading terminal descriptions from termcap if no match is found in the terminfo database. See also the --enable-getcap and --enable-getcap-cache options. --enable-warnings Turn on GCC compiler warnings. There should be only a few. --enable-widec Compile with experimental wide-character code. This makes a different version of the libraries (e.g., libncursesw.so), which stores characters in 16-bits. We provide a simple UTF-8 driver and test program to use this feature with terminals that can display UTF-8. NOTE: applications compiled with this 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 --enable-xmc-glitch Compile-in support experimental xmc (magic cookie) code. --with-ada-compiler=CMD Specify the Ada95 compiler command (default "gnatmake") --with-ada-include=DIR Tell where to install the Ada includes (default: PREFIX/lib/ada/adainclude) --with-ada-objects=DIR Tell where to install the Ada objects (default: PREFIX/lib/ada/adalib) --with-dbmalloc For testing, compile and link with Conor Cahill's dbmalloc library. --with-debug Generate debug-libraries (default). These are named by adding "_g" to the root, e.g., libncurses_g.a --with-develop Enable experimental/development options. This does not count those that change the interface, such as --enable-widec. --with-dmalloc For testing, compile and link with Gray Watson's dmalloc library. --with-fallbacks=XXX Specify a list of fallback terminal descriptions which will be compiled into the ncurses library. See CONFIGURING FALLBACK ENTRIES. --with-gpm use Alessandro Rubini's GPM library to provide mouse support on the Linux console. --with-install-prefix=XXX Allows you to specify an alternate location for installing ncurses after building it. The value you specify is prepended to the "real" install location. This simplifies making binary packages. NOTE: a few systems build shared libraries with fixed pathnames; this option probably will not work for those configurations. --with-manpage-format=XXX Tell the configure script how you would like to install man-pages. The option value must be one of these: gzip, compress, BSDI, normal, formatted. If you do not give this option, the configure script attempts to determine which is the case. --with-manpage-renames=XXX Tell the configure script that you wish to rename the manpages while installing. Currently the only distribution which does this is the Linux Debian. The option value specifies the name of a file that lists the renamed files, e.g., $srcdir/man/man_db.renames --with-manpage-symlinks Tell the configure script that you wish to make symbolic links in the man-directory for aliases to the man-pages. This is the default, but can be disabled for systems that provide this automatically. Doing this on systems that do not support symbolic links will result in copying the man-page for each alias. --with-normal Generate normal (i.e., static) libraries (default). --with-profile Generate profile-libraries These are named by adding "_p" to the root, e.g., libncurses_p.a --with-rcs-ids Compile-in RCS identifiers. Most of the C files have an identifier. --with-shared Generate shared-libraries. The names given depend on the system for which you are building, typically using a ".so" suffix, along with symbolic links that refer to the release version. NOTE: Unless you override the configure script by setting the $CFLAGS environment variable, these will not be built with the -g debugging option. --with-shlib-version=XXX Specify whether to use the release or ABI version for shared libraries. This is normally chosen automatically based on the type of system which you are building on. We use it for testing the configure script. --with-system-type=XXX For testing, override the derived host system-type which is used to decide things such as the linker commands used to build shared libraries. This is normally chosen automatically based on the type of system which you are building on. We use it for testing the configure script. --with-terminfo-dirs=XXX Specify a search-list of terminfo directories which will be compiled into the ncurses library (default: DATADIR/terminfo) --with-termlib When building the ncurses library, organize this as two parts: the curses library (libncurses) and the low-level terminfo library (libtinfo). This is done to accommodate applications that use only the latter. The terminfo library is about half the size of the total. --without-ada Suppress the configure script's check for Ada95, do not build the Ada95 binding and related demo. --without-cxx XSI curses declares "bool" as part of the interface. C++ also declares "bool". Neither specifies the size and type of booleans, but both insist on the same name. We chose to accommodate this by making the configure script check for the size and type (e.g., unsigned or signed) that your C++ compiler uses for booleans. If you do not wish to use ncurses with C++, use this option to tell the configure script to not adjust ncurses bool to match C++. --without-cxx-binding Suppress the configure script's check for C++, do not build the C++ binding and related demo. --without-progs Tell the configure script to suppress the build of ncurses' application programs (e.g., tic). The test applications will still be built if you type "make", though not if you simply do "make install". COMPATIBILITY WITH OLDER VERSIONS OF NCURSES: -------------------------------------------- Because ncurses implements the X/Open Curses Specification, its interface is fairly stable. That does not mean the interface does not change. Changes are made to the documented interfaces when we find differences between ncurses and X/Open or implementations which they certify (such as Solaris). We add extensions to those interfaces to solve problems not addressed by the original curses design, but those must not conflict with the X/Open documentation. Here are some of the major interface changes, and related problems which you may encounter when building a system with different versions of ncurses: 5.1 (July 8, 2000) Interface changes: + made the extended terminal capabilities (configure --enable-tcap-names) a standard feature. This should be transparent to applications that do not require it. + removed the trace() function and related trace support from the production library. + modified curses.h.in, undef'ing some symbols to avoid conflict with C++ STL. Added extensions: assume_default_colors(). 5.0 (October 23, 1999) Interface changes: + implemented the wcolor_set() and slk_color() functions. + move macro winch to a function, to hide details of struct ldat + corrected prototypes for slk_* functions, using chtype rather than attr_t. + the slk_attr_{set,off,on} functions need an additional void* parameter according to XSI. + modified several prototypes to correspond with 1997 version of X/Open Curses: [w]attr_get(), [w]attr_set(), border_set() have different parameters. Some functions were renamed or misspelled: erase_wchar(), in_wchntr(), mvin_wchntr(). Some developers have used attr_get(). Added extensions: keybound(), curses_version(). Terminfo database changes: + change translation for termcap 'rs' to terminfo 'rs2', which is the documented equivalent, rather than 'rs1'. The problems are subtler in recent releases. a) This release provides users with the ability to define their own terminal capability extensions, like termcap. To accomplish this, we redesigned the TERMTYPE struct (in term.h). Very few applications use this struct. They must be recompiled to work with the 5.0 library. a) If you use the extended terminfo names (i.e., you used configure --enable-tcap-names), the resulting terminfo database can have some entries which are not readable by older versions of ncurses. This is a bug in the older versions: + the terminfo database stores booleans, numbers and strings in arrays. The capabilities that are listed in the arrays are specified by X/Open. ncurses recognizes a number of obsolete and extended names which are stored past the end of the specified entries. + a change to read_entry.c in 951001 made the library do an lseek() call incorrectly skipping data which is already read from the string array. This happens when the number of strings in the terminfo data file is greater than STRCOUNT, the number of specified and obsolete or extended strings. + as part of alignment with the X/Open final specification, in the 990109 patch we added two new terminfo capabilities: set_a_attributes and set_pglen_inch). This makes the indices for the obsolete and extended capabilities shift up by 2. + the last two capabilities in the obsolete/extended list are memu and meml, which are found in most terminfo descriptions for xterm. When trying to read this terminfo entry, the spurious lseek() causes the library to attempt to read the final portion of the terminfo data (the text of the string capabilities) 4 characters past its starting point, and reads 4 characters too few. The library rejects the data, and applications are unable to initialize that terminal type. FIX: remove memu and meml from the xterm description. They are obsolete, not used by ncurses. (It appears that the feature was added to xterm to make it more like hpterm). This is not a problem if you do not use the -x option of tic to create a terminfo database with extended names. Note that the user-defined terminal capabilities are not affected by this bug, since they are stored in a table after the older terminfo data ends, and are invisible to the older libraries. c) Some developers did not wish to use the C++ binding, and used the configure --without-cxx option. This causes problems if someone uses the ncurses library from C++ because that configure test determines the type for C++'s bool and makes ncurses match it, since both C++ and curses are specified to declare bool. Calling ncurses functions with the incorrect type for bool will cause execution errors. In 5.0 we added a configure option "--without-cxx-binding" which controls whether the binding itself is built and installed. 4.2 (March 2, 1998) Interface changes: + correct prototype for termattrs() as per XPG4 version 2. + add placeholder prototypes for color_set(), erasewchar(), term_attrs(), wcolor_set() as per XPG4 version 2. + add macros getcur[xy] getbeg[xy] getpar[xy], which are defined in SVr4 headers. New extensions: keyok() and define_key(). Terminfo database changes: + corrected definition in curses.h for ACS_LANTERN, which was 'I' rather than 'i'. 4.1 (May 15, 1997) We added these extensions: use_default_colors(). Also added configure option --enable-const, to support the use of const where X/Open should have, but did not, specify. The terminfo database content changed the representation of color for most entries that use ANSI colors. SVr4 curses treats the setaf/setab and setf/setb capabilities differently, interchanging the red/blue colors in the latter. 4.0 (December 24, 1996) We bumped to version 4.0 because the newly released dynamic loader (ld.so.1.8.5) on Linux did not load shared libraries whose ABI and REL versions were inconsistent. At that point, ncurses ABI was 3.4 and the REL was 1.9.9g, so we made them consistent. 1.9.9g (December 1, 1996) This fixed most of the problems with 1.9.9e, and made these interface changes: + remove tparam(), which had been provided for compatibility with some termcap. tparm() is standard, and does not conflict with application's fallback for missing tparam(). + turn off hardware echo in initscr(). This changes the sense of the echo() function, which was initialized to echoing rather than nonechoing (the latter is specified). There were several other corrections to the terminal I/O settings which cause applications to behave differently. + implemented several functions (such as attr_on()) which were available only as macros. + corrected several typos in curses.h.in (i.e., the mvXXXX macros). + corrected prototypes for delay_output(), has_color, immedok() and idcok(). + corrected misspelled getbkgd(). Some applications used the misspelled name. + added _yoffset to WINDOW. The size of WINDOW does not impact applications, since they use only pointers to WINDOW structs. These changes were made to the terminfo database: + removed boolean 'getm' which was available as an extended name. We added these extensions: wresize(), resizeterm(), has_key() and mcprint(). 1.9.9e (March 24, 1996) not recommended (a last-minute/untested change left the forms and menus libraries unusable since they do not repaint the screen). Foreground/background colors are combined incorrectly, working properly only on a black background. When this was released, the X/Open specification was available only in draft form. Some applications (such as lxdialog) were "fixed" to work with the incorrect color scheme. IF YOU ARE A SYSTEM INTEGRATOR: ------------------------------ Beginning with 1.9.9, the ncurses distribution includes both a tset utility and /usr/share/tabset directory. If you are installing ncurses, it is no longer either necessary or desirable to install tset-jv. Configuration and Installation: Configure with --prefix=/usr to make the install productions put libraries and headers in the correct locations (overwriting any previous curses libraries and headers). This will put the terminfo hierarchy under /usr/share/terminfo; you may want to override this with --datadir=/usr/share/misc; terminfo and tabset are installed under the data directory. Please configure the ncurses library in a pure-terminfo mode; that is, with the --disable-termcap option. This will make the ncurses library smaller and faster. The ncurses library includes a termcap emulation that queries the terminfo database, so even applications that use raw termcap to query terminal characteristics will win (providing you recompile and relink them!). If you must configure with termcap fallback enabled, you may also wish to use the --enable-getcap option. This option speeds up termcap-based startups, at the expense of not allowing personal termcap entries to reference the terminfo tree. See the code in ncurses/tinfo/read_termcap.c for details. Note that if you have $TERMCAP set, ncurses will use that value to locate termcap data. In particular, running from xterm will set $TERMCAP to the contents of the xterm's termcap entry. If ncurses sees that, it will not examine /etc/termcap. Keyboard Mapping: The terminfo file assumes that Shift-Tab generates \E[Z (the ECMA-48 reverse-tabulation sequence) rather than ^I. Here are the loadkeys -d mappings that will set this up: keycode 15 = Tab Tab alt keycode 15 = Meta_Tab shift keycode 15 = F26 string F26 ="\033[Z" Naming the Console Terminal In various Linuxes (and possibly elsewhere) there has been a practice of designating the system console driver type as `console'. Please do not do this any more! It complicates peoples' lives, because it can mean that several different terminfo entries from different operating systems all logically want to be called `console'. Please pick a name unique to your console driver and set that up in the /etc/inittab table or local equivalent. Send the entry to the terminfo maintainer (listed in the misc/terminfo file) to be included in the terminfo file, if it's not already there. See the term(7) manual page included with this distribution for more on conventions for choosing type names. Here are some recommended primary console names: linux -- Linux console driver freebsd -- FreeBSD netbsd -- NetBSD bsdos -- BSD/OS If you are responsible for integrating ncurses for one of these distribution, please either use the recommended name or get back to us explaining why you don't want to, so we can work out nomenclature that will make users' lives easier rather than harder. RECENT XTERM VERSIONS: --------------------- The terminfo database file included with this distribution assumes you are running an XFree86 xterm based on X11R6 (i.e., xterm-r6). The earlier X11R5 entry (xterm-r5) is provided as well. If you are running XFree86 version 3.2 (actually 3.1.2F and up), you should consider using the xterm-xf86-v32 (or later, the most recent version is always named "xterm-xfree86") entry, which adds ANSI color and the VT220 capabilities which have been added in XFree86. If you are running a mixed network, however, where this terminal description may be used on an older xterm, you may have problems, since applications that assume these capabilities will produce incorrect output on the older xterm (e.g., highlighting is not cleared). CONFIGURING FALLBACK ENTRIES: ---------------------------- In order to support operation of ncurses programs before the terminfo tree is accessible (that is, in single-user mode or at OS installation time) the ncurses library can be compiled to include an array of pre-fetched fallback entries. These entries are checked by setupterm() only when the conventional fetches from the terminfo tree and the termcap fallback (if configured) have been tried and failed. Thus, the presence of a fallback will not shadow modifications to the on-disk entry for the same type, when that entry is accessible. By default, there are no entries on the fallback list. After you have built the ncurses suite for the first time, you can change the list (the process needs infocmp(1)). To do so, use the script MKfallback.sh. A configure script option --with-fallbacks does this (it accepts a comma-separated list of the names you wish, and does not require a rebuild). If you wanted (say) to have linux, vt100, and xterm fallbacks, you would use the commands cd ncurses; MKfallback.sh linux vt100 xterm >fallback.c Then just rebuild and reinstall the library as you would normally. You can restore the default empty fallback list with MKfallback.sh >fallback.c The overhead for an empty fallback list is one trivial stub function. Any non-empty fallback list is const-ed and therefore lives in sharable text space. You can look at the comment trailing each initializer in the generated ncurses/fallback.c file to see the core cost of the fallbacks. A good rule of thumb for modern vt100-like entries is that each one will cost about 2.5K of text space. BSD CONVERSION NOTES: -------------------- If you need to support really ancient BSD programs, you probably want to configure with the --enable-bsdpad option. What this does is enable code in tputs() that recognizes a numeric prefix on a capability as a request for that much trailing padding in milliseconds. There are old BSD programs that do things like tputs("50"). (If you are distributing ncurses as a support-library component of an application you probably want to put the remainder of this section in the package README file.) The following note applies only if you have configured ncurses with --enable-termcap. ------------------------------- CUT HERE -------------------------------- If you are installing this application privately (either because you have no root access or want to experiment with it before doing a root installation), there are a couple of details you need to be aware of. They have to do with the ncurses library, which uses terminfo rather than termcap for describing terminal characteristics. Though the ncurses library is terminfo-based, it will interpret your TERMCAP variable (if present), any local termcap files you reference through it, and the system termcap file. However, in order to avoid slowing down your application startup, it will only do this once per terminal type! The first time you load a given terminal type from your termcap database, the library initialization code will automatically write it in terminfo format to a subdirectory under $HOME/.terminfo. After that, the initialization code will find it there and do a (much faster) terminfo fetch. Usually, all this means is that your home directory will silently grow an invisible .terminfo subdirectory which will get filled in with terminfo descriptions of terminal types as you invoke them. If anyone ever installs a global terminfo tree on your system, this will quietly stop happening and your $HOME/.terminfo will become redundant. The objective of all this logic is to make converting from BSD termcap as painless as possible without slowing down your application (termcap compilation is expensive). If you don't have a TERMCAP variable or custom personal termcap file, you can skip the rest of this dissertation. If you *do* have a TERMCAP variable and/or a custom personal termcap file that defines a terminal type, that definition will stop being visible to this application after the first time you run it, because it will instead see the terminfo entry that it wrote to $HOME/terminfo the first time around. Subsequently, editing the TERMCAP variable or personal TERMCAP file will have no effect unless you explicitly remove the terminfo entry under $HOME/terminfo. If you do that, the entry will be recompiled from your termcap resources the next time it is invoked. To avoid these complications, use infocmp(1) and tic(1) to edit the terminfo directory directly. ------------------------------- CUT HERE -------------------------------- USING NCURSES WITH AFS: AFS treats each directory as a separate logical filesystem, you can't hard-link across them. The --enable-symlinks option copes with this by making tic use symbolic links. USING NCURSES WITH EMACS: GNU Emacs has its own termcap support. By default, it uses a mixture of those functions and code linked from the host system's libraries. You need to foil this and shut out the GNU termcap library entirely. In order to do this, hack the Linux config file (s/linux.h) to contain a #define TERMINFO and set the symbol LIBS_TERMCAP to "-lncurses". We have submitted such a change for the 19.30 release, so it may already be applied in your sources -- check for the #define TERMINFO. USING NCURSES WITH GPM: Ncurses 4.1 and up can be configured to use GPM (General Purpose Mouse) which is used on Linux console. Be aware that GPM is commonly installed as a shared library which contains a wrapper for the curses wgetch() function (libcurses.o). Some integrators have simplified linking applications by combining all or part of libcurses.so (the BSD curses) into the libgpm.so file, producing symbol conflicts with ncurses (specifically the wgetch function). You may be able to work around this problem by linking as follows: cc -o foo foo.o -lncurses -lgpm -lncurses but the linker may not cooperate, producing mysterious errors. A patched version of gpm is available: dickey.his.com:/ncurses/gpm-1.10-970125.tar.gz This patch is incorporated in gpm 1.12; however some integrators are slow to update this library. Current distributions of gpm can be configured properly using the --without-curses option. BUGS: Send any feedback to the ncurses mailing list at bug-ncurses@gnu.org. To subscribe send mail to bug-ncurses-request@gnu.org with body that reads: subscribe ncurses <your-email-address-here> The Hacker's Guide in the misc directory includes some guidelines on how to report bugs in ways that will get them fixed most quickly.