5.5. Ncurses-5.9

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

5.5.1. Installation of Ncurses

When Ncurses is compiled, it executes tic to create a terminfo database in ${prefix}/share/terminfo. If possible, the Makefile will use the tic binary that was just compiled in its source tree, but this does not work when Ncurses is cross-compiled. To allow the Ncurses build in Constructing a Temporary System to succeed, we will build and install a tic program that can be run on the host system.

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=/cross-tools \
    --without-debug --without-shared

The meaning of the new configure options:

--without-debug

Tells Ncurses to build without debugging information.

--without-shared

This prevents Ncurses from building its shared libraries, which are not needed at this time.

Only one binary is needed for the Cross-Tools. Build the headers and then build tic:

make -C include
make -C progs tic

Install tic with the following command:

install -v -m755 progs/tic /cross-tools/bin

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