6.11. Ncurses-5.9

The Ncurses package contains libraries for terminal-independent handling of character screens.

6.11.1. Installation of Ncurses

We will need Ncurses for several other packages in the temporary environment, including Bash, Util-linux, and Vim.

The following patch fixes an issue with some Bash versions:

patch -Np1 -i ../ncurses-5.9-bash_fix-1.patch

Prepare Ncurses for compilation:

./configure --prefix=/tools --with-shared \
    --build=${CLFS_HOST} --host=${CLFS_TARGET} \
    --without-debug --without-ada \
    --enable-overwrite --with-build-cc=gcc

The meaning of the new configure options:

--with-shared

This tells Ncurses to create a shared library.

--without-debug

This tells Ncurses not to build with debug information.

--without-ada

This ensures that Ncurses does not build support for the Ada compiler which may be present on the host but will not be available when building the final system.

--enable-overwrite

This tells Ncurses to install its header files into /tools/include, instead of /tools/include/ncurses, to ensure that other packages can find the Ncurses headers successfully.

--with-build-cc=gcc

This tells Ncurses which compiler to use to build native tools when cross-compiling.

Compile the package:

make

Install the package:

make install

Details on this package are located in Section 10.22.2, “Contents of Ncurses.”