Re: [PATCH 07/11] gnu: ncurses: support mingw.

[Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org>]

Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org> writes:

> Hmm...the patch removes the duplication, it also rebuilds everything of
> course.  Would this be the way to do it, would we want to have this in
> core-updates or is there a better way?

Even just modifying the existing 'ncurses' derivations will force ~10000
rebuilds, which is far too much outside of core-updates.

In theory, it should be possible to arrange for the 'ncurses'
derivations to be unchanged when not targetting mingw, by doing these
tests on the client side instead of the build side.  Remember that these
backquoted excerpts of code are being generated on the client side to be
run later on the build side, so we should be able to arrange for this
generated code to be unchanged except on mingw.  However, dealing with
the patch will be a bit ugly.  The job of modifying curses.h.in would
have to be moved to a phase.

I'll try to find time in the next day or two to attempt this, and see if
it can be done reasonably or if the resulting code would be too nasty to
consider.

Thanks for working on this.

      Mark