Bug 10482
| Summary: | Backward-incompatible changes to TERMTYPE cause core dumps | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | [Retired] Red Hat Linux | Reporter: | Sebastiano Vigna <sebastiano.vigna> |
| Component: | ncurses | Assignee: | Bernhard Rosenkraenzer <bero> |
| Status: | CLOSED RAWHIDE | QA Contact: | |
| Severity: | high | Docs Contact: | |
| Priority: | medium | ||
| Version: | 6.2 | CC: | bly |
| Target Milestone: | --- | ||
| Target Release: | --- | ||
| Hardware: | All | ||
| OS: | Linux | ||
| Whiteboard: | |||
| Fixed In Version: | Doc Type: | Bug Fix | |
| Doc Text: | Story Points: | --- | |
| Clone Of: | Environment: | ||
| Last Closed: | 2000-04-07 20:01:07 UTC | Type: | --- |
| Regression: | --- | Mount Type: | --- |
| Documentation: | --- | CRM: | |
| Verified Versions: | Category: | --- | |
| oVirt Team: | --- | RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host: | |
| Cloudforms Team: | --- | Target Upstream Version: | |
| Embargoed: | |||
This has to be a slip-up by RedHat. I would have expected the ncurses-5.0 set to have libncurses.so.5 and kin, and for a backwards compatability set with libncurses.so.4.2. This problem has bitten us hard - we were about to go to production with our latest software built under RH6.1 with the expectation that it would work under 6.2. Now we have to stop and consider what to do. A proper fix asap would be nice. Rawhide has a libncurses.so.5 |
ncurses 5.0 changed in a backward-incompatible way the TERMTYPE structure, going from typedef struct termtype { /* in-core form of terminfo data */ char *term_names; /* str_table offset of term names */ char *str_table; /* pointer to string table */ char Booleans[BOOLCOUNT]; /* array of values */ short Numbers[NUMCOUNT]; /* array of values */ char *Strings[STRCOUNT]; /* array of string offsets */ ... to typedef struct termtype { /* in-core form of terminfo data */ char *term_names; /* str_table offset of term names */ char *str_table; /* pointer to string table */ char *Booleans; /* array of boolean values */ short *Numbers; /* array of integer values */ char **Strings; /* array of string offsets */ ... The SYNTACTIC access to the structure is the same, thanks to the confusion existing in C between an array and the pointer to its first element, but the SEMANTICS is completely screwed up. All programs (such as ne, the nice editor) accessing directly the capabilities strings in the terminfo database will now need to be distributed in two distinct binary versions, pre-5.0 and post-5.0. To make things even worse, the package ncurses-5.0 installs a library called libncurses.so.4.0, while the package ncurses-4.2 installs a library called libncurses.so.4.2.