[Slackbuilds-users] libncurses / libtinfo

[B Watson]

On 1/5/15, Robby Workman <rworkman at slackbuilds.org> wrote:

> Ideally, volkerdi would add a symlink into Slackware proper for that,
> since this isn't the first time something like this has occurred.
> However, the second best solution IMHO, and the one that will be needed
> for 14.1, is to create a separate "package" at SlackBuilds.org that
> is basically just a symlink and a README into the docs directory that
> explains why it's there.  Feel free to submit a "libtinfo" package. :-)

This seems like it might be a bad idea. I can imagine some configure
script detecting that libtinfo.so is found, and getting  confused...

Maybe for  the binary build of ghc, a better solution would be to stick
the libtinfo.so symlink in a private lib dir (say,
/usr/lib(64)/ghc/libtinfo.so),
along with the real ghc binar(y|ies), and have the ghc commands in
/usr/bin actually be shell scripts that add /usr/lib/ghc to LD_LIBRARY_PATH
and then exec /usr/lib/ghc/$0. This is ugly, but at least the ugly is
confined to the ghc package only, and the system lib dir won't  get
polluted.

Another idea (that may be impractical/impossible):

You're using a binary build I assume because ghc is a Haskell compiler
that's written in Haskell. Maybe it's worth bootstrapping it: temporarily
install the binary build (in $PKG/bootstrap, if the binary build can handle
being install in an arbitrary location), then use that to compile the real
ghc that you're going  to install with prefix=$PKG/usr, then rm -rf
$PKG/bootstrap. You'd have to make the libtinfo symlink in $PKG/bootstrap
and use LD_LIBRARY_PATH for bootstrapping, but  hopefully you'd end
up with  a ghc that links to libncurses (which might require patching
the ghc source, I haven't looked at it, as I do not speak Haskell).