Re: ANN: NetworkManager 0.9.9.98 (0.9.10-rc1) released

[Robby Workman <robby rlworkman net>]

On Thu, 26 Jun 2014 07:55:58 +0200
Vincent Bernat <bernat luffy cx> wrote:

>  ❦ 25 juin 2014 21:36 -0500, Robby Workman <robby rlworkman net> :
>
> > Okay, looks like that's ncurses, so let's link ncurses too:
> >
> >   [rworkman liberty NetworkManager-0.9.9.98]$ gcc -o testrl
> > -lreadline -lncurses testrl.c [rworkman liberty
> > NetworkManager-0.9.9.98]$ strings testrl | grep readline
> > libreadline.so.6 readline
> >   readline
> >
> > Now, here's where I'm unclear.  If I add LDFLAGS="-lnurses" to the
> > configure environment, the test passes and the complete build
> > occurs successfully. What's unclear is *why* that's needed -- is
> > this an omission in the NM sources (isn't nmtui a curses client and
> > thus ncurses should be linked?) or is something different about how
> > we (Slackware) build readline?
>
> GNU readline requires linking to ncurses as well to get termcap
> symbols. Here is an autoconf recipe for that:
>  http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf-archive/ax_lib_readline.html

If I'm reading that correctly, that snippet above tries to link
in curses if it encounters failure, so perhaps NM should use it?
Maybe not though - there's at least one other project (nftables)
where I've encountered the same problem.

While digging around a bit after sending this, I found that we add
"--with-curses" to the readline configure to use it instead of 
libtermcap, so it's *supposed* to be linked in already and this 
would not be a problem.  However, for whatever reason (it's not
clear whether it's intentional or not), the upstream sources don't
use TERMCAP_LIBS (set to "-lcurses" per the configure flag) when
building the shared library.  It appears that at least one distro
solves that by running 'make SHLIB_LIBS="-lcurses"' when building,
but I don't see where Fedora did that, so it's not clear at all 
how they link curses (or even if they do, when means I wonder how
the configure test in OP works there). 

Assuming this is indeed a problem, it's been in Slackware for years
without causing any actual issues - the readline library from 13.37
(released in April 2011) doesn't link ncurses either, so I'm not
convinced that we're doing anything wrong (but I'm open to argument).

-RW