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

On 30-Oct-98 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).

I'm guessing here, but could it be a replacement for things like readline?
I know old OS versions could have any number of things stuck to it, and 
after some of the things I've seen HP-UX do over the years, nothing really
surprises me anymore.

> 
> 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?

How wise would that be at this time?  That may be something to do at
a time like a minor version release.

Vince.
-- 
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Vince Vielhaber -- KA8CSH   email: vev@michvhf.com   flame-mail: /dev/null      # include <std/disclaimers.h>
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