ncurses -> netbsd-curses ? about repo HOT 8 CLOSED

Is there a good reason to not simply relegate this to community?

from repo.

The depends file of each package would have to be updated to use netbsd-curses, you'll need to fork every package to use this instead of ncurses so it can't be moved to community.

Or did you mean moving the issue to community ?

from repo.

I mean why wouldn't you simply add netbsd-curses to community like we put {s,u}base, nawk, coreutils in community?
Moreso I mean what's the reason we would replace ncurses by netbsd-curses? What's the good, motivating reason to do it?

from repo.

ah, I felt that netbsd-curses is more suitable for KISS than ncurses (kiss size netbsd-curses: 3MB total, kiss size ncurses: 17MB total), and the depends file is the issue with putting it in community. Nothing has a hard dependency on what base utilities you use so this is not the issue with nawk etc.

from repo.

Actually, If someone wants to use netbsd-curses then they can just rename their package to ncurses which will make this a non-issue.

from repo.

The size benefits are fine (great, even), but I'm not sure how one would build alsa-mixer with netbsd-curses, so you'd have to adapt alsa-utils. Additionally, tic won't work in the way many terminal emulators would expect; the most prominent example which comes to mind is foot (see this). I'm not sure what other terminal emulators are effected by this, but I'd imagine it's a nonzero number.
If st builds with netbsd-curses with no issues (it should) and we're fine with adding --disable-alsamixer to alsa-utils, then I guess the switch is fine. The build files for community packages would have to be checked (like htop will not build without adjustment) but I can't think of any other program in the core repo which would have issues.

from repo.

Looks like the issue with foot is present with alacritty aswell, and alsamixer is probably important for a lot of people. I now think that packaging netbsd-curses as ncurses would be the better approach if someone wants to swap out ncurses, I'll still try building all the packages with netbsd-curses to see if it would be feasible in main repos.

from repo.

Some packages will need in community like lynx will need modifications from the README in the linked repo + stuff like llvm links to ncurses if available, we don't want to force everyone to rebuild such fat packages. There might be some other weirdness that might occur in some packages even if they build.

from repo.