jack, curses and rpms

[Andrew M. Kuchling]

"Juergen A. Erhard" <jae at ilk.de> writes:
> Why two versions?  Did Oliver forget to submit his patches to Guido
> (et al)?  Or did Guido not accept them?  If so, why not?
> 
> What needs to be done to synchronize the canonical Python and the
> Python RPMs?

Here's the story.  Oliver Andrich maintains a bunch of Python-related
RPMs at www.andrich.net, and he also did an enhanced version of the
curses module that provides many additional features such as ncurses.
So Oliver's RPMs contain the fancy cursesmodule; Debian's Python
distribution probably doesn't have it, and neither does a stock Red
Hat.

The problem is that Oliver's enhanced module probably won't work on
systems that support only BSD curses.  I have not verified this; if
someone wants to try compiling it on a system with only plain curses,
that would be useful.  I don't believe it was ever submitted to GvR
for inclusion.

ncurses implements the SYSV curses API, and BSD curses is no longer
maintained, so maybe there are no platforms left that only have plain
curses, and compatibility is no longer an issue.  (Do the *BSDs use
ncurses as standard these days?)  Also, maybe so few people use the
cursesmodule that GvR wouldn't care if there was a
backwards-incompatible change.

-- 
A.M. Kuchling			http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/
When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him *whose*?
    -- Don Marquis