Bug 291238 – ncurses doesn't compile with USE=unicode when ncurses has not yet been installed before

• Product: Gentoo/Alt
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description Dirk Tilger 2009-10-30 23:21:46 UTC]

I tried to bootstrap a fresh gentoo-prefix on a Debian Linux following the Solaris guide. Compiling ncurses (for bash) failed due to linkage problems. With UNICODE support turned on, two versions of ncurses are built: one classical and one with multibyte character support. The latter gets the suffix "w" for all libraries. libncurses.so becomes libncursesw.so.

Compilation fails with:
-----8<-----
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lncurses
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[1]: *** [test_opaque] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `[whatever $EPREFIX points to]/var/tmp/portage/sys-libs/ncurses-5.7/work/narrowc/test'
make: *** [all] Error 2
-----8<-----

The problem exists with the portage tree fetched from the bootstrap script as well as for 5.7. My notes here refer to ncurses-5.7, but I would assume them being equally valid for the one coming with the bootstrap script (5.6).

The reason for the problem lies in a patch ncurses-5.7-irix.patch applied after the compilation phase that will insert "-L../lib -lncurses" into the linker parameters for the test_opaque application. In the wide character ncurses libncurses.so doesn't exist and if it doesn't exist in the system either, the linking fails.

The proposed solution is to replace the linking parameters with the $(TEST_ARGS) parameter from the Makefile that will have the right value assigned by autoconf. It supply a few additional libraries to the linker, but I would assume on most system that these will eventually be ignored when not needed.

[Comment 1 Dirk Tilger 2009-10-30 23:23:40 UTC]

Created attachment 208815 [details, diff]
Modification done to the IRIX patch to make it work.

I have tested the modification only with USE="unicode -ada -debug -doc (-gpm) -minimal -nocxx -profile -trace" on a Debian Linux system.

[Comment 2 Fabian Groffen 2009-10-31 11:20:15 UTC]

Why are you bootstrapping with USE=unicode?  USE flags are only set at late state when the system is going to rebuild itself exactly to avoid things like this

[Comment 3 Dirk Tilger 2009-11-03 11:49:29 UTC]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Why are you bootstrapping with USE=unicode?  USE flags are only set at late
> state when the system is going to rebuild itself exactly to avoid things like
> this
> 

For the bootstrapping: as I just explained in the chat "unicode" comes with the profile.

Though I can't test it, I would have assumed that this IRIX patch will break whenever you switch on unicode, regardless of whether you're bootstrapping or not, unless some other flags then disable the compilation of this test.

[Comment 4 Dirk Tilger 2009-11-03 14:00:48 UTC]

Created attachment 209127 [details]
Build log

build log from bootstrap. ncurses gets pulled in from 1.7: bash.

[Comment 5 Fabian Groffen 2009-11-03 19:38:20 UTC]

ok, thanks, this looks like a regression indeed

[Comment 6 Fabian Groffen 2009-11-11 15:42:20 UTC]

patch applied, thanks