[Pkg-pascal-devel] Bug#898017: ncurses abi change.

[peter green]

On 07/05/18 08:28, Paul Gevers wrote:
> Hi Peter,
>
> On 07-05-18 03:54, peter green wrote:
>>> I have asked the release team not to binnmu fpc and I would suggest
>>> avoiding uploads of the fpc package until we have looked at this.
>> Ok, it appears I was a little mistaken, I thought the freepascal IDE
>> uses ncurses but it seems it does not.
> I already missed it in the transition tracker.
>
>> I got an answer from the ncurses maintainer with more details on the ABI
>> change and even a patch.
>> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=894049#39
>>
>> So afaict what we need to do is.
>>
>> 1. Apply svens patch
>> 2. Add breaks ( libncursesw5-dev << 6.1+20180210 ) to
>> fp-units-base-<version>
> Why breaks in a fpc package? If anything, I think it should be a
> conflicts. (Or a breaks in the ncurses package).
Ideally we would want something on both sides. To prevent an old fp-units-base being used with a new ncurses or vice-versa.

Normally one would use a versioned dependency instead of a breaks on the fpc side but fp-units-base doesn't actually depend on the library packages because it provides units for a number of unrelated C libraries (whether this is good design or not is debatable but it's how the fpc packages in Debian have always been).
> Apart from my remark, it sounds right to me.
>
> I must say that I don't like the way FreePascal freezes the library
> interfaces like they do. I believe these files are generated,
My experience creating freepascal imports for c libraries is that there is a tool (h2pas) that does some of the work but that manual editing is needed to turn the results into something usable.