Ultrix cbreak (curses) missing?

[Andrew Zimmerman]

In article <172 at larry.sal.wisc.edu>, jwp at larry.sal.wisc.edu (Jeffrey W Percival) writes:
> I am running Ultrix 2.2 and 3.0, and noticed that although
> cbreak and nocbreak are mentioned in the curses man pages,
> they do not exist in /lib/libcurses.a!
> 
> Is this an error?  Where can I get them?  Have they been
> displaced by some other call?
> -- 
> Jeff Percival (jwp at larry.sal.wisc.edu)


As the previous article mentions, cbreak, and nocbreak don't exist
in /lib/libcurses.a.  Instead, DEC has chosen to put them in
/lib/libcursesX.a.  If memory serves my right, there is also a
different include file for this package.  I ran across this problem
a couple of month ago when I tried to compile the unix spreadsheet
program sc.

Actaully, DEC's libs are becoming a major pet peeve of mine.  In addition
to the above problem, I have a had lib problems with both xdvi and
just today with xfig.

The problem with xdvi was that it used some of the athena libs.  When I
talked to DEC about it, they said that they have chosen not to support
the athena libs.  This would have been fine with me, but the routine
that was calling the anthena funtion was part of DEC's library.

When compiling xfig, I got the message that calloc was multiple defined.
It turns out that calloc was defined in both libc.a and libX11.a.  After
removing the function Xvmsalloc.o from libX11.a xfig compiled.

In the case of xdm, I finally just gave up.  Although it did compile,
it have major problems handling the display.

It has gotten to the point that I am beginning to question the choice of
using DEC equipment with the Xwindow environment.

Orignally, we tried to use decwindow, but the rest of the users complained
that it was two slow.  Even though this was true, I continued to encourage
the use of decwindows, until a user showed me how to become su through
a bug in decwindows.  It was at this point that we switched over to
"X11".

Sorry to be so negative of DEC.  In general we have had very good
luck with their hardware and service.  However, in my opinion,
DEC's software could be improved.

Andrew Zimmerman
zimmer at calvin.stanford.edu
(a DEC 3200 running Ultrix 3.0)