Re: ncurses-4.0 un-announcement

> Hmm... I don't seem to have that message here. It could be that I
> missed it in some local procmail configuration hiccup.
that's possible. I really don't know.
 
> > Juergen, Zeyd and I have been sending email to each other for a few months.
>
> Oh, I'm not suprised - the list isn't always an appropriate forum for
> some issues. (I notice that you don't include Eric in that group).
Eric's been (shall I say) hostile for months. I don't respond to people
who are like that -- wastes time & energy and resolves nothing.
 
> > > It obviously caught Zeyd by suprise too, and he's apparently going to
> > > re-release it. Now it seems that we will soon have two ncurses-4.0
> > > releases. This is not good (and in this case, especially not good for
> > > linux). <sigh>
> > No. He was aware that it would be coming, but he hasn't been devoting
>
> Hehehe... he's *wanted* it to happen for quite a while now :-)
I'm not sure what Zeyd wants.

> Why does Zeyd carry such authority with ncurses when he's not doing
> anything for it? (Historical reasons, I assume).
just historical. When I came into this, I _hoped_ that I could simply
make my resizeterm/wresize changes and move on. But Zeyd is (ahem)
not responsive to changes, and it took me a while to catch on that
Eric was doing the work. Once that go through my head, then we went
in a cycle where I'd beat on both of them to get fixes in (rather
frustrating when I have to repeat patches 3-5 times before they get it
in -- I've worked on a few dozen programs maintained by other people,
and this one has been the hardest). If I'd simply wanted to own it,
I'd have done _that_ in mid 1995. I'm a little dense, though.

So I put up with Zeyd, because he's (sort of) running the mailing
list (though the dropouts are confusing).
 
> Anyway, enough of all this political crap... I'm more interested in
> getting a good compile and install of ncurses-4.0 onto my linux box
> here, getting rid of the old ncurses libraries, making sure other
> applications don't cough and die, and continue development work on a
> couple of programming projects that I'm working on (ever too slowly)
> that use the ncurses library.
right. The 4.x series ought to be pretty stable. Some people are pushing
some of the extensions, but I think I'll try to keep those as build-options,
so the basic release will be compatible.
 
> BTW, have you noticed how popular your diffstat program has become?
> I've mentioned (and demonstrated) it in several mailing lists, and it
> has impressed many. Same for vttest (especially for those doing work
> on the linux ggi project).
good. (I'll be doing more on vttest in the next month or so; it's
linked in with the work I'm doing on xterm).

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey
dickey_at_clark.net