Bug#548070: ITP: libpdcurses0 -- X/Open curses library with an X11 and SDL interface

[Agustin Martin <agmartin@debian.org>]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 06:13:22PM +0300, Peter Pentchev wrote:
> Package: wnpp
> Severity: wishlist
> Owner: Peter Pentchev <roam@ringlet.net>
> 
> * Package name    : libpdcurses0
>   Version         : 3.4
>   Upstream Author : William McBrine <wmcbrine@users.sf.net>
> * URL             : http://pdcurses.sourceforge.net/
> * License         : Public domain, MIT, GPL-2+
>   Programming Lang: C
>   Description     : X/Open curses library with an X11 and SDL interface
> 
> The main reason I want to package this library is that asciiportal
> (in a separate ITP) uses its SDL bindings for its weird half-TUI,
> half-GUI :)

(cc'ing Anders Kaseorg and upstream William McBrine, hi both)

Hi, Peter

Sorry for the late reply, I should at least have said hello when I first
noticed your ITP.

During some time I have been playing with a personal package for XCurses put
at my personal Debian area. It dealt only with XCurses to play with THE (an
IBM XEDIT clone) under X system and had it at my personal git area under
alioth, 

  git://anonscm.debian.org/users/agmartin/pdcurses.git

I am not very familiar with the internals of shared libraries, so I did not
make an ITP myself, just kept it as a personal package and offered it in the
THE list in case people finds it useful.

When I later noticed your interest about the SDL stuff I had a look at that
part, but finally did nothing but a very preliminary intent of building a
shared library for it.

Browsing recently for more info, I also noticed that my original package was
used by Anders Kaseorg (cc'ed) as a basis for a package un Ubuntu, including
static SDL stuff,

  http://ppa.launchpad.net/anders-kaseorg/ubuntu/pool/main/p/pdcurses/

It contains libpdcurses-dev for the SDL stuff, and libxcurses3 and
libxcurses-dev for the X stuff as in my original package.

I have recently started playing with libtool (just for fun) and used PDcurses
as my testing target. I never played before with libtool or automake and only
a little with autoconf, but after some work, seems I have something that may
work. It creates

libxcurses3 and libxcurses-dev       for the XCurses stuff
libsdlcurses3 and libsdlcurses-dev   for the SDL stuff

including shared and static libraries for both. All the build process is done
without touching upstream files, so I can safely test things under Debian
without putting much noise in diffs. I tested the resulting XCurses stuff and
seems to work similarly to my old package (THE works, some demos segfault,
some work). I also did a minimal SDL test (just sdltest) which seemed 
successful. 

I have removed some of the original AC-like macros where I hope libtool will
do a better job, but as said before, I am not an expert about this. Apart
from that, I disabled MH_CHECK_LIB, which will not find some libs in new
Debian multiarch lib structure breaking build in current Debian sid (and
which also included some extra unneeded libs for xorg) and used plain 
AC_CHECK_LIB. This will not check for old XFree86, so is not very portable,
but is a first step.

Currently most things are intended to be started from debian/rules, until
proper Makefile is created. However, although things are done outside the
upstream tree, I think that if things finally work properly the system can
also be useful upstream (thus he is cc'ed) and easily put there.

Did not yet push my changes to above git repo nor sent a package with new
stuff to my Debian area, just wanted to comment on this first, but will do
soon if desired. Comments are welcome.

Regards,

PS: Contributors, please keep bug address cc'ed in replies, thanks.

-- 
Agustin