After several days playing around with newt i am quite disappointed to come to a point where i have to say, that newt has not only a very limited documentation (i think there’s only documentation of about 50% of the newt functionality) — which would not be that of a problem, though. The bigger problem is, that things are very unstable. “Segmentation faults” reproducable on different operating systems and platforms — not sure though, if the problem is newt or pecl_newt. However: this is definitly not what i want. So, let’s move on to something better.
I had a look at the apple’s opensource repository the other day and stumbled over a ncurses package. I had problems with the normal gnu ncurses package before, it would not install but hang when building the terminfo database. With the ncurses package i found at apple’s opensource repository, i get it to install. Here is the howto:
Note: The first three steps below are for osx 10.5.x. For osx 10.6.6 simply download ncurses 5.7 and build it using ./configure --with-shared.
- Download ncurses from apple’s opensource repository. You can find it by clicking on the link of the Mac OSX version you are running, eg. 10.5.8.
- Unpack the package und you get a directory called something like “ncurses-21” or so. Next cd into this direktory and run make and sudo make install. If make complains about a missing directory /tmp/ncurses/Build, just create it mkdir -p /tmp/ncurses/Build and start again.
- Now an intermediate build should have been generated. Next cd /tmp/ncurses/Build, make and sudo make install. Now ncurses should have been successfully installed.
- Ready to install the ncurses php extension by either executing sudo pecl install ncurses or downloading ncurses from pecl.php.net and building manually.
- Don’t forget to add ncurses.so to your php.ini
Now everything should be ready to start writing ncurses apps — however: for me it sill did not work. The simplest ncurses app resultet in the following error message:
Error opening terminal: vt100.
What’s going on? dtruss might be your friend to figure this out. Execute the following command, where example.php is your ncurses app you want to run: sudo dtruss php example.php. You should see output like:
[...]
lstat("/Users/harald\0", 0xBFFFE41C, 0xFFFFFFFFBFFFEFC8) = 0 0
lstat("/Users\0", 0xBFFFE2EC, 0xFFFFFFFFBFFFEFC8) = 0 0
ioctl(0x3, 0x4004667A, 0xBFFFF17C) = -1 Err#25
ioctl(0x3, 0x402C7413, 0xBFFFF150) = -1 Err#25
fstat(0x3, 0xBFFFF1B0, 0xBFFFF150) = 0 0
mmap(0x0, 0x226, 0x1, 0x2, 0x3, 0x100000000) = 0x17FA000 0
lseek(0x3, 0x0, 0x1) = 518 0
munmap(0x17FA000, 0x1F3) = 0 0
close_nocancel(0x3) = 0 0
ioctl(0x1, 0x4004667A, 0xBFFFECEC) = 0 0
stat("/Users/harald/.terminfo\0", 0xBFFFEC00, 0xBFFFECEC) = 0 0
access("/Users/harald/.terminfo/73/vt100\0", 0x4, 0xBFFFECEC) = -1 Err#2
stat("/usr/local/share/terminfo\0", 0xBFFFEC00, 0xBFFFECEC) = -1 Err#2
write_nocancel(0x2, "Error opening terminal: vt100.\n\0", 0x24) = 36 0
You can see, that ncurses is looking for a file vt100 in a terminfo directory and fails looking at /usr/local/share/terminfo. I indeed had no directory /usr/local/share/terminfo but a directory /usr/share/terminfo. I was not able to figure out, where i could specify the correct directory configuration for this, so i just created a symlink: sudo ln -snf /usr/share/terminfo /usr/local/share/terminfo. After creating the symlink, i was able to execute my example ncurses application. Find a complete list of binary broker here.
