[issue2889] curses for windows (alternative patch)

[Paul Moore]

Paul Moore added the comment:

The patch would need updating to be applicable. Minimum changes I would expect to be required:

1. Update to build for Python 3.5 (the patch will *not* be included in earlier versions, as it is a new feature), which means it needs the Visual Studio 2015 build files updating.
2. Rather than wholesale dumping a curses implementation into the Python source (which is what pdcurses.patch seems to do) the appropriate curses source should be fetched via the externals.bat script, like the other external dependencies.
3. Documentation. At a minimum "available in Windows from Python X.Y", but probably also document any differences from Unix, which from the comments here are likely to exist if the patch uses pdcurses on Windows.
4. Tests. Again, make sure that any functionality that differs is properly covered on Windows, or skip specific Unix-only functionality.

That's quite a lot of changes, in practice.

Unless someone is going to step up and do all of that (and keep it maintained until it gets merged, which probably won't be till 3.6) *and* there's one of the core devs willing to support the code going forward once its committed, then I think closing this as "won't fix" and referring to the external packages is the best solution.

A documentation patch to https://docs.python.org/3.4/howto/curses.html ("Curses programming with Python") which explained how to set up one of the external curses modules on Windows, and how to write cross-platform code that uses the core implementation on Unix and the 3rd party module on Windows, would be immensely useful for people interested in this patch. Probably far more so than pushing for this patch to go in, in all honesty, as it's easier to do and would be useful to people on older versions of Python as well.

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