So over the holidays, I managed to get in some good quality family time and find some time to work on some Open Source stuff. I meant to work mainly on dhcpcd, but it turned out I spent most of my time working on NetBSD curses library so that Python Curses now works with it. Now, most people reading this blog may not care much for NetBSD or for curses, but it’s important because ncurses is used pretty much everywhere by default … aside from NetBSD. And most readers should know, I go out of my way to promote interoperable software even when it’s at a detriment to my own projects. That’s just how I roll.
There is a apparently a thing called PD Curses but I don’t know anywhere that actually uses it by default. If you know, please email me @ roy@marples.name or tweet me. I do know that the pkgsrc curses framework supports it.
And this is the thing I’m currently doing. As NetBSD curses supports more POSIX functions (and a few ncurses extensions, sadly) more and more packages now work alongside NetBSD curses, so I’m plowing through pkgsrc again moving things to the curses framework. This is important, because there is logic in devel/ncurses to use NetBSD curses when passing certain criteria, but sadly this always brings ncurses as a possibility to be linked or it’s header used, both of which are quite bad for NetBSD curses so there is a method to my madness.
One interesting thing though is that since I started comitting my curses patches, it turns out that Sabotage Linux is using NetBSD curses and made it portable. I’m chatting with one of their devs and we’re starting to merge of a few of their patches back into NetBSD.