search

mscdex / node-ncurses

An ncurses binding for node.js
MIT License
385 stars 25 forks source link

use system curses #5

Closed aeosynth closed 12 years ago

aeosynth commented 13 years ago

is it really necessary to build ncurses from source?

mscdex commented 13 years ago

Maybe not, but I've found that important fixes for showstopping bugs are often released by the author of ncurses before most distros include such patches.

aeosynth commented 13 years ago

An author's development branch usually is ahead of a distro's stable branch - that's true for most packages. Installing a package shouldn't require you to compile linux from scratch, however. If someone wants the latest version of a package, they should use their package manager to get it; you shouldn't be forcing it upon them.

At least, that's my opinion.

mscdex commented 13 years ago

I'll gladly accept a patch to support usage of a shared ncurses library as a node-waf configure option (for example: '--use-shared').

mscdex commented 12 years ago

After working on this a bit, I don't think it's going to be possible unfortunately.

It boils down to the fact that all ncurses packages (that I could find for major distros) do not build/include a shared version of the C++ interface. Trying to link with the static library that is included in ncurses-devel packages causes PIC errors (at least on my 64-bit machine), seemingly no matter how many workarounds I try.

So, while I may be able to just pull out the source code for the C++ interface and reduce my dependency on just that, that is not a good solution either because it's possible that that bundled C++ interface may not match up with a particular version of the shared ncurses library on the system.

If you have any other ideas or are able to get a shared version successfully compiled in some way, let me know. Until we are able to come up with something doable, I'm going to close this for now.