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

On Fri, 30 Oct 1998, Tom Lane wrote:

> 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?

Good stuff, you are learning...do not pull anything out, period.
Don't add anything in, period. There was a reason for it, but it was
sooooo long ago that I don't recall what it was. It has worked up until
now, and if only HPUX 10.01 is reporting a problem with it...leave it.
Mark it as un-supported at this time, and work at fixing it post-release.

Marc G. Fournier
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: scrappy(at)hub(dot)org secondary: scrappy(at){freebsd|postgresql}.org