Bug#687238: missing libncursesw5-dev or equivalent in sources, error : cannot find -lncursesw in path

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

notfound 687238 libsdl1.2/1.2.14-6.1
tags 687238 + unreproducible
stop


Hello,

2012/9/20 PICCORO McKAY Lenz <mckaygerhard at gmail.com>:
> http://200.62.27.27/redmine/projects/venenuxmassenkoh/wiki/Sdlbuilderrorncursesw

There are several things odd/wrong with this build log:

1) It seems that you're trying to compile 1.2.14-6 (dating from early
2010 in Debian), the version in current stable is 6.1 and already
almost 2 years old.  In general it would be nice to try to use a newer
version, I don't think that it adds anything negative and it should
have some handy fixes.  You sent a link before with a .dsc using
1.2.15, so I don't know what's going on there...

In any case, the maintainers are responsible for versions coming
directly from us and since the last stable release, and with versions
of the dependencies also coming from official Debian releases.

2) The build log contains the following lines:

  dpkg-buildpackage: source package libsdl1.2
  dpkg-buildpackage: source version 1.2.14-6vnzet1
  dpkg-buildpackage: source changed by PICCORO Lenz McKAY
<mckaygerhard at gmail.com>

So this is in fact not a version coming directly from Debian, it
contains other changes, and as far as I know, you have not provided
them, so we can only speculate about what's wrong.

The fact that nobody else complained about this in the last few
months/years, Dominique cannot reproduce it with a clean build, and
that there are modifications not coming from us, is an indication that
those modifications are probably at fault, or at least should be
investigated before.

3) In the build log, before the linker option "-lncursesw", it appears
"/usr/lib/libaa.so".  libaa support was removed about year and a half
ago [1] because it's kind of superceded by caca.

In fact, I did investigate the link to 1.2.15 that you posted a few
days ago (not very handy, I had to download the files composing the
source one by one), and for example esd, libaa and arts dependencies
are not disabled, when they've been disabled in Debian for years.

4) libncursesw should be pulled from libcaca, SDL doesn't used
libncursesw directly.  The fact that it's not pulled by libcaca is
probably because you're also using a very old version or something
like that, since it build-depends on ncursesw since 2008 [2].

In any case, and this is the most important point, SDL doesn't use
ncurses/ncursesw directly, so it would be actually wrong to include
this dependency in our package (which is what the bug report
requests).

5) And finally, in order to be able to debug things, we would need a
build log using pbuilder/cowbuilder, with a clean environment, pulling
dependencies directly from a Debian mirror.  If you are using
dpkg-buildpackage we cannot see e.g. which version of libcaca is using
for example, or if you're using non standard packages, so we're again
in pure-speculation territory.


For all of the above, I believe that the bug is invalid and I am
marking it as such and closing it.  Please reopen the bug and provide
the information requested if you believe that there's a problem with
current versions of the package.

Cheers.

[1] http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/libs/libsdl1.2/current/changelog#version1.2.14-6.3
[2] http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/libc/libcaca/libcaca_0.99.beta18-1/changelog#version0.99.beta13b-5

-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>