[tlbuild] compilation problem: curses

[Peter Breitenlohner]

On Sun, 14 Aug 2011, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> I have a question about compilation of TL. I tried to compile the
> trunk version of TL on Debian Squeeze (mips64) and I get a report
> about missing curses. (I will retry with the tag 2011, but it takes a
> loooooot of time.)

Hi Mojca,

and it won't change anything.

> It seems to me that libncurses is installed, but I'm not sure what
> this error means exactly. Is it something wrong in the building
> scripts or something missing on machine?

where is the library (libncurses.so or libncurses.a) and where are the
headers?  You may have to add configure options such that they are found.

The easieast thing to do is first to compile TL configured with
'--disable-dialog' (to see if there are other problems) and independently
try to build just dialog as obtained from
 	ftp://invisible-island.net/dialog/dialog-1.1-20110707.tgz
to see what configure options might be required. (TL uses the unmodified
source tree, except for updated versions of config.sub and such.)

> checking for specific curses-directory... no
> checking for extra include directories... no
> checking if we have identified curses headers... none
> configure: error: No curses header-files found

This tells us that no (n)curses headers were found.  The file config.log in
BUILD/utils/dialog/dialog-1.1-20110707/ may contain details why that is so.

On our OpenSuSE (x86_64) we have
   /usr/include/curses.h -> ncurses/curses.h
   /usr/include/ncurses/curses.h
   /usr/include/ncurses.h -> ncurses/ncurses.h
   /usr/include/ncurses/ncurses.h -> curses.h
and the libraries
   /usr/lib64/libncurses.so -> /lib64/libncurses.so.5.7
   /lib64/libncurses.so.5 -> libncurses.so.5.7
   /lib64/libncurses.so.5.7
   /lib/libncurses.so.5 -> libncurses.so.5.7
   /lib/libncurses.so.5.7
but no /usr/lib/libncurses.so.  Yours will, of course, be different.

Regards
Peter Breitenlohner <peb at mppmu.mpg.de>