RE: [HACKERS] Why is libcurses added to build by configure?

psql (at least in 6.3.2) uses curses and readline. I know this because I
tried to compile under a SuSE 5.3 distribution. Configure couldn't find the
curses library, so it wasn't added to LIBS, so the linker didn't try to use
it, so psql had unresolved references, all of which seems to indicate (even
without reading the sources) that *something* in there wants curses. I.e.,
it's not just configure.

Interestingly, failing to find curses did NOT stop configure, it went on to
make everything. "make all" didn't stop when psql failed to build either - it
went on to report all well at the end. Not until "make install" did the
failure become evident (though it was logged of course).

Regards, K.

Am 30-Oct-98 schrieb Tom Lane:
> Does anyone understand why configure.in wants to include libcurses in
> $(LIBS) ? There is no program in the PostgreSQL distribution that uses
> that library (at least, I could not find any reference to curses.h).
>
> On HPUX 10, including libcurses causes problems because it defines a
> select() routine that has nothing to do with the select() system call.
> There is a hack in Makefile.hpux that gets around this (by linking -lc
> ahead of the libraries chosen by configure), but that is going to cause
> problems for supporting HPUX 10.01, because signal considerations demand
> that -lBSD come first on that platform.
>
> I would like to pull out the configure.in code that adds -lcurses to
> LIBS, but I'm hesitant to do it at this late stage in the release cycle
> without knowing why it was there in the first place. Did we use to have
> a frontend that used curses, or something like that?
>
> regards, tom lane
>

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