ncurses is ancient, and rxvt terminfo is broken

[Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@worldvisions.ca>]

Hi all,

I was just curious why we have such an old version of ncurses (1.9.9g) still
in the distribution now that the GNU ncurses 4.2 is out.

People noticed months ago (leading to the long and complicated transfer of
ownership to FSF) that ncurses versions up to 4.1 are actually non-free
according to the DSFG:

        Permission is hereby granted to reproduce and distribute ncurses
        by any means and for any fee, whether alone or as part of a
        larger distribution, in source or in binary form, PROVIDED
        this notice is included with any such distribution, not removed
        from header files, and is reproduced in any documentation
        accompanying it or the applications linked with it.

There is nothing permitting people to make modifications.

Many other changes have been made since 1.9.9 was released.  Why are we
still using the old one?

Further, the problem with rxvt's terminfo "rmcup" entry still has not been
fixed in ncurses-base_1.9.9g-8.10.  It should clear the screen on return
from the alternate screen buffer, just like xterm does.

Is ncurses orphaned?

Have fun,

Avery