curses/ncurses mess - help welcomed

[Nikhil Nair <nn201@cus.cam.ac.uk>]

Hi,

I installed ncurses (currently 1.9.7a) from the sources, not realising 
until recently that there was a debian package. :-)  Unfortunately, my 
setup is now a bit of a mess ...

I'm thinking of removing what I've got and reinstalling.  I've currently 
got both libc's and both compilers, and would like to be able to compile 
for both a.out and elf (I've got to produce a stable, a.out gnuchess to 
replace the current, broken version).  I don't seem to have either 
/usr/lib/libcurses.a or /usr/lib/libtermcap.a ...

So, am I right in saying that the default curses library for Debian is 
BSD (you need -I/usr/include/ncurses to get ncurses working, don't you)?

Basically, I need to know what to install, and how to compile both ELF 
and a.out with them ...

Also, gnuchess uses BSD curses (or seems to), but the curses version is 
broken - backspace doesn't work.  Can I just replace BSD curses with 
ncurses, and if so, do I still need termcap?  I tried without termcap, 
but got undefined symbols ...

TIA,

Nikhil.