In Fedora 37 ncurses was updated from 6.2-9 to 6.3-3, but the ncurses-compat-libs package doesn't exist (check https://pkgs.org/download/ncurses-compat-libs or just try `$ sudo dnf install ncurses-compat-libs`). Downgrading ncurses is a nontrivial task because a lot of things depend on it. IMO, ncurses-compat-libs should be added for F37 (which certainly exists for version 6.3-3), or Fedora should stay on version 6.2-9 of ncurses.
The ncurses-compat-libs subpackage was dropped in 6.3-1, 7 years after the ncurses 6 ABI was introduced in Fedora. There should be no packages in Fedora using the previous ABI. We don't want to keep it in the distro forever. If you have some software using the old ABI, you will need to rebuild it with the current ncurses-devel package.
*** Bug 2135400 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Why not build ncurses with argument --with-abi-version=5 ? Android AOSP build is dependent of libncurses.so.5
We were doing that for 7 years. I think that is enough time for all applications that are still maintained to be rebuilt. As noted in the bug #2135400, AOSP builds with symlinks .so.5 -> so.6.
*** Bug 2144184 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 2150117 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Would it make sense to ship those symlinks in the compat package then?
I checked the compilation times, and it's 2:30 vs 4:30 on my machine. So a noticeable difference. OTOH, the package builds so quickly that it doesn't really matter. I'd vote for restoring the compat library too. This is clearly causing problems for many people. Other projects *should* have been updated, but for various reasons, they clearly weren't. Fedora is not just Fedora packages, we also care about what people put on top.
I would also welcome restoring this library.
I had a problem installing Xilinx because of this bug, so of course, I would be glad if this library was restored, too.
Dear all, I agree that it in an ideal world would be time to say goodbye to libncurses.so.5. However, a lot of development tools that are only available as binaries do require libncurses.so.5 as they are created to run on a huge number of machines. I myself ran into this issue when trying to compile Android's AOSP. This source tree unfortunately also contains binaries that require said library. Please consider keeping the libncurses.so.5 supported as long as upstream provides support with the compile flag. Thanks a lot from a lot of developers running various (big) tools! I consider this a *severe* bug as it breaks compatibility from previous versions of Fedora without a clear technical advantage. It actually blocks me in progressing in what I'm doing right now.
Another software needing libncurses.so.5 is STM32 (https://www.st.com/en/development-tools/stm32cubeide.html#get-software) a development tool to develop for STM32 embedded devices, which is closed source, and can not ve recompiled.
Another software that requires libncurses.so.5 is the Tectia SSH Client from SSH.com. This software is delivered as RPM packages so there is no way around it.
Following recommendation from FESCo, the compat-libs subpackage is restored in ncurses-6.3-4.20220501.fc37.
FEDORA-2023-c6973a909a has been submitted as an update to Fedora 37. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2023-c6973a909a
(In reply to Miroslav Lichvar from comment #14) > Following recommendation from FESCo, the compat-libs subpackage is restored > in ncurses-6.3-4.20220501.fc37. Thanks for adding it back. Please keep it in there till at least upstream removes it. I hope it does not cost extra work for you. In the FESCo meeting, talk was about supporting it until FC40. I fear we may need to support it way longer as the blob vendors may want to support old Ubuntu's that don't have libncurses.so.6 available.
(and the package is running fine, I gave karma af Bodhi)
FEDORA-2023-c6973a909a has been pushed to the Fedora 37 testing repository. Soon you'll be able to install the update with the following command: `sudo dnf upgrade --enablerepo=updates-testing --refresh --advisory=FEDORA-2023-c6973a909a` You can provide feedback for this update here: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2023-c6973a909a See also https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Updates_Testing for more information on how to test updates.
FEDORA-2023-c6973a909a has been pushed to the Fedora 37 stable repository. If problem still persists, please make note of it in this bug report.