Updating emacs fails

[Lowell Gilbert]

"John R. Levine" <johnl at iecc.com> writes:

>>>> On 23/10/2011 09:03, John R. Levine wrote:
>>>>>>    checking for tparm in -lncurses... no
>>>>>>
>>>>>> but that's not correct.  libncurses should certainly contain that
>>>>>> symbol.  I get a 'yes' there on my stable/8 machine.  As -lncurses is
>>>>>> part of your LDFLAGS ... hmmm... do you have libncurses on your system
>>>>>> anywhere other than in /lib ?
>>>>>
>>>>> I have the ncurses-5.9 package installed from ports.  Several gnome
>>>>> programs depend on it:
>>>>>
>>>>> pkg_delete: package 'ncurses-5.9' is required by these other packages
>>>>> and may not be deinstalled:
>>>>> aalib-1.4.r5_6
>>>>> gnome-games-2.32.1_2
>>>>> guile-1.8.8
>>>>> libcdio-0.82_2
>>>>> libxine-1.1.19_7
>>>>
>>>> Interesting.  Can you try moving /usr/local/lib/libncurses.* and
>>>> /usr/local/include/ncurses.h aside temporarily and then rebuild emacs?
>>>> If that works, then looks like you've found a bug in the editors/emacs
>>>> port, which should be reported to the port's maintainer.
>>>
>>> Yup, that fixed it.  I'll file a bug report.  I tried rebuilding some
>>> of the packages that allegedly depend on the ncurses port, and they
>>> all seemed to work OK, so the right solution may be to deprecate the
>>> ncurses port or fold it into the mainline system.
>>
>> The way it's supposed to work is that emacs will depend on (and link to)
>> ncurses if it's installed when the emacs port is built, and to the base
>> system curses if not.  I just did a quick test, and this was just what
>> did happen.  So at least part of the problem is local to your system...
>
> Did you try installing the ncurses port and then rebuilding emacs? For
> some reason the library in the ncurses port doesn't define the termcap
> routines, leading to the problem.

Yes, that's just what I did, and I got an emacs that was linked against
the port version of ncurses.  It worked fine.  I then deleted the
ncurses port to make sure emacs *really* was using ncurses from the
port, and, indeed, emacs stopped working.

> This computer has an extremely vanilla install of 8.2 with gnome.  I'm
> having trouble figuring what I'm doing different from anyone else
> other than perhaps doing portupgrade more often than others do.

I do it pretty often myself...