Info about PDCURSES, a X11/SDL curses package

[Agustin Martin]

Hi, SDL maintainers, Peter and Alen

Some time ago I read news about SDL team revitalization, and wanted to
let you know about this ITP,

http://bugs.debian.org/548070

This is about PDCurses, an X/Open curses library with X11 and SDL interfaces.

It does not build the SDL part by default (not included in main build
chain). For some time I was building personal packages for the X11
port, mostly to be used by another personal package with a X11 port of
"the Hessling editor",  "the" (a text editor intended to be similar to
the IBM VM/CMS System Product Editor, XEDIT and to KEDIT from
Mansfield Software). "the" is in Debian, but only the ncurses build is
used. Contacting Debian "the" maintainer about this has been in my
TODO list for years, but I always left this for later, cc'ing him now
to make sure he knows about this.

Some time after Peter filed his ITP, I started playing with the
PDCurses SDL part and with libtool, to build both XCurses and
sdlcurses libraries in a way that tries to avoid touching upstream
build chain and includes proposed fixes for some bugs. Resulting
packages seem to work well in Debian, and some packages are built (see
more details in above ITP),

Source package: pdcurses

Binary packages:

 * Runtime shared libraries:
   - libxcurses3
   - libpdcurses3

 * Static libraries and unversioned shared link:
   - libxcurses-dev
   - libpdcurses-dev

 * Headers (needed by both libxcurses-dev and libsdlcurses-dev):
   - pdcurses-headers

Note that I use libpdcurses3, libpdcurses-dev and libpdcurses.* for
the SDL stuff, honouring current upstream naming scheme. I'd
personally prefer something like pdcurses-sdl or sdlcurses, but I
tried to not differ from upstream. I already mailed him with no reply.

My current stuff is in "tmp/libtool" branch at

git://anonscm.debian.org/users/agmartin/pdcurses.git

It does not contain some more recent changes I did (like multiarch
changes), because I wanted that to be usable in squeeze.

The ITP has been idle for a while and I also left this in stand-by for
some time, so I use your old announce as an excuse to ping about it,
also because I think the SDL team may be interested in knowing about
this package (Peter planned it inside the games team).

I currently do not plan to become Debian main maintainer for this
package, but my git repo may be useful to anyone interested. I could
however help if needed.

Regards,

-- 
Agustin