Simple question about ncurses and ncursesw

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 14, 2010, at 08:49, Tabitha McNerney wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 11:48 PM, Rainer Müller wrote:
>> On 2010-03-05 19:09 , Tabitha McNerney wrote:
>> > I have what I hope is a simple question about ncurses and ncursesw. I'm
>> > essentially wondering what the difference is between these two ports? I
>> > noticed their checksums (for the source are the same), so why not just
>> > combine them into one port?
>> 
>> ncursesw provides wide-character support. But usually we want both, wide
>> and narrow characters, thus we need to compile the library twice with
>> different configure flags (--enable-widec for ncursesw). A Portfile can
>> only handle one run of configure/make/make install, therefore we need
>> two Portfiles for this.
> 
> Thank you for answering this question. It seems that this is a restriction imposed based on how MacPorts were designed. If someone were to build ncurses with both wide and narrow characters from the same single source tarball, would they also have to do something similar with ./configure that is analogous to MacPorts treatment of two separate port files, or would it be feasible to just do this all at once?

Based on what Rainer said, it sounds like you need to configure, build, and install twice: once each for narrow and wide character support.