Re: ncurses is ancient, and rxvt terminfo is broken

[Martin Schulze <joey@finlandia.Infodrom.North.DE>]

Avery Pennarun wrote:
> 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?

Err, if the new ncurses is non-free and if we include it in favour of the
old one, tons of packages suddenly become non-free (i.e. for contrib) just
because they base on ncurses which has become non-free?

Am I paranoid?  In that case, I'd rather like to stick with the old
version.

Regards,

	Joey

-- 
The MS-DOS filesystem is nice for removable media.  -- H. Peter Anvin