ncurses 5 -> 6 transition means we probably need to drop some libraries from the manylinux whitelist

[njsmith]

The PEP 513 whitelist includes libpanelw.so.5 and libncursesw.so.5, both of which are part of ncurses version 5.

But apparently the new hostness is ncurses 6, which breaks ABI with ncurses 5. I'm told that Fedora 24 and successors have already switched to ncurses 6, with the ncurses 5 libraries being available in a compatibility package, but not installed by default. So... I guess these have to be dropped from the whitelist.

[njsmith]

Confirmation:
https://gist.github.com/squeaky-pl/8867a701eec5af1eb989f0fc47574924

(Thanks to @squeaky-pl for pointing this out)

[njsmith]

This might cause some "fun" for people, but so it goes...:

<squeaky_pl> njs, actually distributions don't agree about where to put terminal database files
<squeaky_pl> so it's not trivial either
<njs> .......of course they don't.
<squeaky_pl> I had to patch ncurses for portable pypy to make things work
<squeaky_pl> njs, there are aparently ways to bundle some terminal database info inside ncurses without relying on external databases but I failed to make it work with Python's curses module

I guess anaconda must have noticed this already given that they're now shipping ncurses: https://anaconda.org/anaconda/ncurses

[ogrisel]

Is there an easy way to check which projects on pypi rely on ncurses 5 being part of the PEP513 whitelist to be able to notify the maintainers?

[squeaky-pl]

I manually walked top 20 results for curses and ncurses on pypi and didn't find any manylinux wheels. But of course that doesn't mean they are not there.

[njsmith]

I don't know of an easy way. I suppose it wouldn't be hard to get a list of all manylinux wheels (via the API or the bigquery download logs – assuming all wheels are downloaded at least once – or asking Donald) and then writing some script to grovel over them to see what libraries they link to. But it would be annoying :-)

Is it a high priority? I guess the default if we do nothing is that projects will be notified by a combination of (a) complaints from Fedora users, and (b) complaints from auditwheel when they try to release a new version.

[ogrisel]

(b) complaints from auditwheel when they try to release a new version.

+1

[squeaky-pl]

Apparently Sabayon Linux is also using ncurses6. See conda-forge/ncurses-feedstock#29 (comment)

[mayeut]

ncurses has been dropped since manylinux2010.
Shall it be dropped in auditwheel for manylinux1 ?