Re: ncurses 5.4 - upgrade?

[Matthew Dillon <dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

:Hello,
:
:	Would it be possible to upgrade the ncurses base to ncurses 5.4? I've been 
:running with ncurses 5.4 in base for while. I installed over the base 
:ncurses with 5.4, and all works very well. There are many fixes and cleanup 
:in the include files. I've not yet looked at the source. I'd like for 
:thoughts, comments, and questions on this one. No "5.1 is stable" arguments 
:please, we aren't debian. :)
:
:						dross

    Yes, absolutely... would you like to submit a patch set ?  Are you 
    familiar with our new format for vendor contrib source?

    The way our new vendor form works is something like this:

    * unpack vendor distribution as /usr/src/contrib/ncurses-5.4

    * create README.DELETED and README.DRAGONFLY files (see some of the
      other vendor dists, such as /usr/src/contrib/cvs-1.12.11/ 

    * no vendor files are modified, no other files are created.  Files
      not used by the build are removed (usually this is quite a few).
      (these files must be listed in README.DELETED).

    * Adjust the build tree to refer to the new vendor distribution,
      create any patches etc as necessary in the build tree.  In the
      case of ncurses, the only build tree references are from:

      /usr/src/lib/libform
      /usr/src/lib/libmenu
      /usr/src/lib/libncurses
      /usr/src/lib/libpanel

      Typically, if possible, consolidate the NCURSES= assignments into
      a single Makefile.inc emplaced in e.g. /usr/src/lib/libncurses/,
      which other Makefile's .include to get the NCURSES assignment,
      so future updates require fewer changes to the build tree.

    Someone taking on this work would provide a patch set for the build
    tree and would construct the README.DRAGONFLY and README.DELETED
    files (README.DRAGONFLY would say where we can fetch the vendor dist),
    then someone like me or Joerg will use those instructions to create
    the vendor tree in /usr/src/contrib/ncurses-5.4, and we would apply
    the patch to the build tree, test everything, and commit.

    Would you like to have a go at it?   Unless the ncurses folks have made
    major changes to the codebase it shouldn't be too hard to bring in,
    but it is definitely a weekend's worth of work.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>