Switching to ncurses

[Bernardo Innocenti]

Are we still planning to completely replace termcap with
ncurses in Fedora?

While I welcome reducing the number of dupe packages, I'm
worried by the impact of this change on the size and
performance of many core programs.

libncurses is much bigger than libtermcap, and also has
oddly large .bss and .data sections:

 bender:/[1/0]# size /lib64/libncurses.so.5 /lib64/libtermcap.so.2
   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
 319006   56608    3592  379206   5c946 /lib64/libncurses.so.5
  10483     788     112   11383    2c77 /lib64/libtermcap.so.2

this is going to impact very negatively on the RSS of several
critical programs such as bash and python.

I'm also worried that the overall time required spent for a
fork may increase considerably.

But maybe ncurses can easily be fixed to avoid global data and
buffers?

-- 
   // Bernardo Innocenti - Develer S.r.l., R&D dept.
 \X/  http://www.develer.com/