[techtalk] who else uses ncurses?

[Shirrell]

I am having portability problems which seem to be related to
ncurses.

Background:  a 600,000 + line Fortran package which through a c
  interface uses curses to provide full screen menus and 
  data entry.   Home environment SUN Solaris, runs also on DGUX,
  Xenix, Aix and just about any Unix we have tried.

First linux port March 1998 SuSE 5.2.  Upgraded gcc and g77 to
overcome early g77 problems.  No problems running on SuSE or Caldera.
However, did not implement some minor X11 features because of
problems installing XFree86.

Brought in RedHat 6.1 to provide an alternate test and to get the
X11 stuff implemented.  Found that RedHat modules could not run
on SuSE.  However, SuSE modules could run on RedHAT as long as
the ncurses library was statically linked
into the module.  There were two succesful modules.  

  SuSE linked entirely static
  SuSE dynamic but with ncurses linked as static

Then:

Potential customer cannot run either module from early RedHat (4.2).
(This may just be the way that things are. You can go up but now down.) 

In attempting to find out why and perhaps solve things, I have now
installed gcc and g77 6.95.2 on both SuSE and RedHat.  Again, RedHat 
modules cannot run on SuSE but SuSE modules can run under RedHat
with the same constraints as before.

In addition, the RedHat modules running on RedHat (no matter how linked)
all dump core in the middle of the standard test run if, and only if,
ncurses has been invoked in any way at the beginning of the run. 
This is not a problem running the SuSE modules under RedHat.

SuSE seems to have ncurses.1 while RedHat has libraries for ncurses
3.0 and 4.2.

I would appreciate any help or insight on this problem

Shirrell Buhler, P-STAT, Inc.
sb at pstat.com


************
techtalk at linuxchix.org   http://www.linuxchix.org