[oe] We need newer ncurses Was: Host Environment affect on target builds

[Martin Jansa]

On Fri, Jun 04, 2010 at 08:19:13PM -0500, Ambrose, Martin wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> I don't really understand why some recipes depend on the host environment.
> 
> For example, on my Fedora 12 machine I have:
>     $ yum info ncurses-devel | grep Release
>     Release    : 3.20090207.fc12
>     $ ncurses5-config --libs
>     -lncurses
> 
> And on my Fedora 13 machine this is a bit newer
>     $ yum info ncurses-devel | grep Release
>     Release    : 7.20100130.fc13
>     $ ncurses5-config --libs
>     -lncurses -ltinfo
> 
> The newer version lists tinfo library in addition to ncurses. Don't know why but OK.
> The problem is the configure (autoconf) portion of recipes (here alsa-utils) uses this executable
> to determine library linkage dependencies. So I get a build error even though this is for the target (here arm).
>     /opt/arm-2009q1/bin/../lib/gcc/arm-none-linux-gnueabi/4.3.3/../../../../arm-none-linux-gnueabi/bin/ld: cannot find -ltinfo
> 
> This seems counter intuitive to me. Is this expected? Or maybe I missed something in setting up my OE environ.

It's not expected and it shouldn't use ncurses*5-config from host, but
from ncurses-native. But for some reason ncurses-native_5.4.bb does not
stage ncurses*5-config and then alsa-utils-1.0.20/configure.in
AC_CHECK_PROG([ncursesw5_config], [ncursesw5-config], [yes])
finds ncurses5-config from your host instead of from staging..

According to ncurses-5.6/ANNOUNCE it's available in 5.6 and newer.

So to fix this, we need newer ncurses/ncurses-native in OE, or hack
configure.in to ignore ncurses5-config ncursesw5-config..

BTW: 5.4 is >6years old, 5.7 ~2years old (latest)

Is someone already working on newer ncurses recipes?

Regards,

-- 
Jansa 'JaMa' Martin     jabber: Martin.Jansa at gmail.com