bug#50444: Remove support for the curses library

bug#50444: Remove support for the curses library

[Stefan Kangas]

Severity: wishlist
X-Debbugs-CC: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>

Building with curses is, according to Paul Eggert:

    "Completely broken" in the sense it won't link and Emacs won't build,
    yes. (It will link in master, due to a patch I installed recently.)

    And yes, the original curses library has been obsolete for at least two
    decades.

See the discussion here:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2021-01/msg00416.html

The conclusion from that thread AFAIU is that support for curses
should be removed.  (We should keep ncurses though.)

bug#50444: Remove support for the curses library

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se>
> Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2021 02:28:31 +0200
> Cc: paul eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
> 
> Building with curses is, according to Paul Eggert:
> 
>     "Completely broken" in the sense it won't link and Emacs won't build,
>     yes. (It will link in master, due to a patch I installed recently.)
> 
>     And yes, the original curses library has been obsolete for at least two
>     decades.
> 
> See the discussion here:
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2021-01/msg00416.html
> 
> The conclusion from that thread AFAIU is that support for curses
> should be removed.  (We should keep ncurses though.)

Doesn't that mean we will be removing support for AIX (and any other
systems that cannot use ncurses due to the same problem)?  Are we
willing to drop support for those platforms because of curses?  AFAIU,
the original problem was fixed, and there's no longer a link error
when using curses.

In any case, if we are planning to drop support for curses, we need
to obsolete it first, i.e. add a configure-time warning for that.

bug#50444: Remove support for the curses library

[Paul Eggert]

On 9/6/21 11:03 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> Doesn't that mean we will be removing support for AIX (and any other
> systems that cannot use ncurses due to the same problem)?

Yes it does mean that, at least, on AIX systems without any of the other 
terminal libraries installed.

> the original problem was fixed, and there's no longer a link error
> when using curses.

That's right. So I guess we should keep curses support, for the odd user 
still running Emacs on AIX. Sorry about any confusion on the topic.

bug#50444: Remove support for the curses library

[Stefan Kangas]

tags 50444 notabug
close 50444
thanks

Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> writes:

> That's right. So I guess we should keep curses support, for the odd user
> still running Emacs on AIX. Sorry about any confusion on the topic.

OK, thanks for clearing that up.

bug#50444: Remove support for the curses library

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

If curses support is actually needed for some systems
which people still run Emacs on, and it does work on those
systems, there is no need to delete it.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)