ncurses update to 6.0

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Fri, Aug 21, 2015 at 04:18:51PM +0200, Miroslav Lichvar wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 21, 2015 at 12:18:15PM +0100, Tom Hughes wrote:
> > According to http://www.gnu.org/software/ncurses/ the new ABI should include
> > symbol versioning, which would hopefully avoid the need for a repeat of this
> > pain in the future, but as far as I can see none of the symbols in the
> > current F23 build are versioned?
> 
> The new ncurses libs are in rawhide only. The symbol versioning is
> disabled by default and it's not enabled it in our spec. Enabling it
> is easy, but if we wanted to disable it later, it would require
> immediate rebuild of all ncurses applications, so I'd like to be sure
> it is a good idea before doing so.
> 
> I'm not sure if it would be possible to use symbol versioning for
> compatibility when there are changes in definition of structures like
> cchar_t, as there are between ABI 5 and ABI 6. I think the upstream
> intention is to use it to mark new symbols, not compatibility.
> 
> Hiding private symbols is definitely useful, but with the versioning
> itself I think there could be some drawbacks, e.g. binaries built on
> distros using the versioning won't run on distros not using it.
>
> Also, the number of different versions the symbols use seems to be
> quite large, so there could be an increase in the rpmdb and yum repo
> sizes. I guess that's not really a problem.

None of those are particularly strong reasons, and they could apply to
any library, but versioned libraries are still strongly preferred.
Delaying the switch gains nothing. Everything will have to be rebuilt
after the switch anyway, so it seems reasonable to do it now since
you want to rebuild stuff for the new library anyway.

Zbyszek