ncurses: make host-ncurses use host terminfo

PATCH New Hollis Blanchard 4 participants 9 messages Jul 10, 2018 – Aug 9, 2018

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Hollis Blanchard

author

2018-07-10 16:46 UTC #0 lore raw

PATCH 1/1 ncurses: make host-ncurses use host terminfo

# HG changeset patch
# User Hollis Blanchard <[email protected]> # Date 1531239381 25200
# Tue Jul 10 09:16:21 2018 -0700
# Node ID 5f7fe697b92ac0145674a6c96aad0f787b4bae32 # Parent d71314cdccf1993ccdb05cddb16a5491f0bf723e
ncurses: make host-ncurses use host terminfo

Host GDB suffers a serious problem: pressing backspace (or ^W ^U or any other "delete" key) results in a plain space being printed instead, making the command prompt almost completely unusable.

That's because it's using host-ncurses, which embeds a path for the terminfo database into the library itself. That path ends up being something like /home/hollisb/buildroot.git/output/host/share/terminfo, which obviously doesn't generally exist other hosts. ('relocate-sdk.sh' cannot and does not edit binaries like libncurses.so.6, so doesn't resolve this problem.)

/usr/share/terminfo is a far better path to use, since it almost certainly exists on the host. Theoretically, it could be from a different ncurses version with incompatible terminfo database format, but this doesn't seem to be a problem in practice. (Future patches could address the theoretical problem if it actually appears in real life.)

This change allows buildroot's host gdb, which uses ncurses 6.x, to work on RHEL5, RHEL6, and RHEL7, which all provide terminfo from ncurses 5.x.

Signed-off-by Hollis Blanchard <[email protected]>

package/ncurses/ncurses.mk +1 -0

@@ -153,6 +153,7 @@ HOST_NCURSES_CONF_OPTS = \
 	--without-cxx \
 	--without-cxx-binding \
 	--without-ada \
+	--with-default-terminfo-dir=/usr/share/terminfo \
 	--without-normal
 
 $(eval $(autotools-package))

Arnout Vandecappelle

2018-07-10 19:52 UTC #1 lore raw

PATCH 1/1 ncurses: make host-ncurses use host terminfo

Quoted 18 lines · Hollis Blanchard

# HG changeset patch
# User Hollis Blanchard <[email protected]> # Date 1531239381 25200
# Tue Jul 10 09:16:21 2018 -0700
# Node ID 5f7fe697b92ac0145674a6c96aad0f787b4bae32 # Parent d71314cdccf1993ccdb05cddb16a5491f0bf723e
ncurses: make host-ncurses use host terminfo
Host GDB suffers a serious problem: pressing backspace (or ^W ^U or any other "delete" key) results in a plain space being printed instead, making the command prompt almost completely unusable.
That's because it's using host-ncurses, which embeds a path for the terminfo database into the library itself. That path ends up being something like /home/hollisb/buildroot.git/output/host/share/terminfo, which obviously doesn't generally exist other hosts. ('relocate-sdk.sh' cannot and does not edit binaries like libncurses.so.6, so doesn't resolve this problem.)

Quoted 5 lines

/usr/share/terminfo is a far better path to use, since it almost certainly exists on the host. Theoretically, it could be from a different ncurses version with incompatible terminfo database format, but this doesn't seem to be a problem in practice. (Future patches could address the theoretical problem if it actually appears in real life.)

Indeed, the terminfo information is standardized AFAIU so this should indeed work.

Reviewed-by Arnout Vandecappelle (Essensium/Mind) <[email protected]>

Regards,
Arnout

Quoted 21 lines

This change allows buildroot's host gdb, which uses ncurses 6.x, to work on RHEL5, RHEL6, and RHEL7, which all provide terminfo from ncurses 5.x.
Signed-off-by Hollis Blanchard <[email protected]>
package/ncurses/ncurses.mk +1 -0
@@ -153,6 +153,7 @@ HOST_NCURSES_CONF_OPTS = \
 	--without-cxx \
 	--without-cxx-binding \
 	--without-ada \
+	--with-default-terminfo-dir=/usr/share/terminfo \
 	--without-normal
 
 $(eval $(autotools-package))
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Signature · 6 lines

Arnout Vandecappelle                          arnout at mind be
Senior Embedded Software Architect            +32-16-286500
Essensium/Mind                                http://www.mind.be
G.Geenslaan 9, 3001 Leuven, Belgium           BE 872 984 063 RPR Leuven
LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/arnoutvandecappelle
GPG fingerprint:  7493 020B C7E3 8618 8DEC 222C 82EB F404 F9AC 0DDF

Thomas Petazzoni

Applied

2018-07-17 14:40 UTC #2 lore raw

PATCH 1/1 ncurses: make host-ncurses use host terminfo

In reply to Hollis Blanchard

Hello,

Quoted 6 lines · Hollis Blanchard

# HG changeset patch
# User Hollis Blanchard <[email protected]> # Date 1531239381 25200
# Tue Jul 10 09:16:21 2018 -0700
# Node ID 5f7fe697b92ac0145674a6c96aad0f787b4bae32 # Parent d71314cdccf1993ccdb05cddb16a5491f0bf723e

This mercurial stuff is a bit annoying, as it becomes part of the commit log. I removed it when applying the patch.

Quoted 18 lines

ncurses: make host-ncurses use host terminfo
Host GDB suffers a serious problem: pressing backspace (or ^W ^U or any other "delete" key) results in a plain space being printed instead, making the command prompt almost completely unusable.
That's because it's using host-ncurses, which embeds a path for the terminfo database into the library itself. That path ends up being something like /home/hollisb/buildroot.git/output/host/share/terminfo, which obviously doesn't generally exist other hosts. ('relocate-sdk.sh' cannot and does not edit binaries like libncurses.so.6, so doesn't resolve this problem.)
/usr/share/terminfo is a far better path to use, since it almost certainly exists on the host. Theoretically, it could be from a different ncurses version with incompatible terminfo database format, but this doesn't seem to be a problem in practice. (Future patches could address the theoretical problem if it actually appears in real life.)

Quoted 4 lines

This change allows buildroot's host gdb, which uses ncurses 6.x, to work on RHEL5, RHEL6, and RHEL7, which all provide terminfo from ncurses 5.x.
Signed-off-by Hollis Blanchard <[email protected]>

Applied, thanks!

Thomas Petazzoni

Signature · 3 lines

Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Bootlin (formerly Free Electrons)
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com

Hollis Blanchard

author

2018-07-17 16:53 UTC #3 lore raw

PATCH 1/1 ncurses: make host-ncurses use host terminfo

Quoted 11 lines · Thomas Petazzoni

Hello,
Quoted 6 lines · Hollis Blanchard
# HG changeset patch
# User Hollis Blanchard <[email protected]> # Date 1531239381 25200
# Tue Jul 10 09:16:21 2018 -0700
# Node ID 5f7fe697b92ac0145674a6c96aad0f787b4bae32 # Parent d71314cdccf1993ccdb05cddb16a5491f0bf723e
This mercurial stuff is a bit annoying, as it becomes part of the commit log. I removed it when applying the patch.

You're right, and thank you for removing it.

Hollis Blanchard
Mentor Graphics Emulation Division

Peter Korsgaard

2018-07-19 21:38 UTC #4 lore raw

PATCH 1/1 ncurses: make host-ncurses use host terminfo

In reply to Hollis Blanchard

Quoted 26 lines

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"Hollis" == Hollis Blanchard <[email protected]> writes:
# HG changeset patch
# User Hollis Blanchard <[email protected]> # Date 1531239381 25200
# Tue Jul 10 09:16:21 2018 -0700
# Node ID 5f7fe697b92ac0145674a6c96aad0f787b4bae32 # Parent d71314cdccf1993ccdb05cddb16a5491f0bf723e
ncurses: make host-ncurses use host terminfo
Host GDB suffers a serious problem: pressing backspace (or ^W ^U or any other "delete" key) results in a plain space being printed instead, making the command prompt almost completely unusable.
That's because it's using host-ncurses, which embeds a path for the terminfo database into the library itself. That path ends up being something like /home/hollisb/buildroot.git/output/host/share/terminfo, which obviously doesn't generally exist other hosts. ('relocate-sdk.sh' cannot and does not edit binaries like libncurses.so.6, so doesn't resolve this problem.)
/usr/share/terminfo is a far better path to use, since it almost certainly exists on the host. Theoretically, it could be from a different ncurses version with incompatible terminfo database format, but this doesn't seem to be a problem in practice. (Future patches could address the theoretical problem if it actually appears in real life.)

Quoted 4 lines

This change allows buildroot's host gdb, which uses ncurses 6.x, to work on RHEL5, RHEL6, and RHEL7, which all provide terminfo from ncurses 5.x.
Signed-off-by Hollis Blanchard <[email protected]>

Committed to 2018.02.x and 2018.05.x, thanks.

Signature · 1 line

Bye, Peter Korsgaard

Peter Korsgaard

2018-08-08 14:10 UTC #5 lore raw

PATCH 1/1 ncurses: make host-ncurses use host terminfo

Quoted 1 line

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"Peter" == Peter Korsgaard <[email protected]> writes:

Hi,

Quoted 24 lines

Quoted 23 lines
# HG changeset patch
# User Hollis Blanchard <[email protected]> # Date 1531239381 25200
# Tue Jul 10 09:16:21 2018 -0700
# Node ID 5f7fe697b92ac0145674a6c96aad0f787b4bae32 # Parent d71314cdccf1993ccdb05cddb16a5491f0bf723e
ncurses: make host-ncurses use host terminfo
Host GDB suffers a serious problem: pressing backspace (or ^W ^U or any other "delete" key) results in a plain space being printed instead, making the command prompt almost completely unusable.
That's because it's using host-ncurses, which embeds a path for the terminfo database into the library itself. That path ends up being something like /home/hollisb/buildroot.git/output/host/share/terminfo, which obviously doesn't generally exist other hosts. ('relocate-sdk.sh' cannot and does not edit binaries like libncurses.so.6, so doesn't resolve this problem.)
/usr/share/terminfo is a far better path to use, since it almost certainly exists on the host. Theoretically, it could be from a different ncurses version with incompatible terminfo database format, but this doesn't seem to be a problem in practice. (Future patches could address the theoretical problem if it actually appears in real life.)

Quoted 6 lines

Quoted 4 lines
This change allows buildroot's host gdb, which uses ncurses 6.x, to work on RHEL5, RHEL6, and RHEL7, which all provide terminfo from ncurses 5.x.
Signed-off-by Hollis Blanchard <[email protected]>
Committed to 2018.02.x and 2018.05.x, thanks.

Hmm, this triggers an interesting issue with tic :/

** Building terminfo database, please wait... Running sh ./shlib tic to install /usr/share/terminfo ...

You may see messages regarding extended capabilities, e.g., AX. These are extended terminal capabilities which are compiled using
tic -x
If you have ncurses 4.2 applications, you should read the INSTALL document, and install the terminfo without the -x option.

"terminfo.tmp", line 21272, terminal 'v3220': /home/peko/.terminfo: permission denied (errno 30)

What happens here is that tic doesn't have write access to /usr/share/terminfo (as we are not root), so instead it writes the db to ~/.terminfo.

We in general don't want buildroot to touch any files outside the buildroot output directory (and $TMPDIR), but it normally isn't enforced/checked by the autobuilders. For this specific setup with building inside a container $HOME is mounted readonly, so it really fails.

The question is how to fix it. The logical solution would be to set TERMINFO to get it to put the database somewhere else, but that doesn't work because run_tic.sh overwrites it:

# don't use user's TERMINFO variable
TERMINFO=${DESTDIR}$ticdir ; export TERMINFO

The only fix I can think of is:

HOST_NCURSES_MAKE_ENV += HOME=$(HOST_DIR)

But that isn't very nice. Any other ideas?

Signature · 1 line

Bye, Peter Korsgaard

Arnout Vandecappelle

2018-08-08 20:37 UTC #6 lore raw

PATCH 1/1 ncurses: make host-ncurses use host terminfo

Quoted 53 lines · Peter Korsgaard

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"Peter" == Peter Korsgaard <[email protected]> writes:
Hi,
Quoted 24 lines
Quoted 23 lines
# HG changeset patch
# User Hollis Blanchard <[email protected]> # Date 1531239381 25200
# Tue Jul 10 09:16:21 2018 -0700
# Node ID 5f7fe697b92ac0145674a6c96aad0f787b4bae32 # Parent d71314cdccf1993ccdb05cddb16a5491f0bf723e
ncurses: make host-ncurses use host terminfo
Host GDB suffers a serious problem: pressing backspace (or ^W ^U or any other "delete" key) results in a plain space being printed instead, making the command prompt almost completely unusable.
That's because it's using host-ncurses, which embeds a path for the terminfo database into the library itself. That path ends up being something like /home/hollisb/buildroot.git/output/host/share/terminfo, which obviously doesn't generally exist other hosts. ('relocate-sdk.sh' cannot and does not edit binaries like libncurses.so.6, so doesn't resolve this problem.)
/usr/share/terminfo is a far better path to use, since it almost certainly exists on the host. Theoretically, it could be from a different ncurses version with incompatible terminfo database format, but this doesn't seem to be a problem in practice. (Future patches could address the theoretical problem if it actually appears in real life.)
Quoted 6 lines
Quoted 4 lines
This change allows buildroot's host gdb, which uses ncurses 6.x, to work on RHEL5, RHEL6, and RHEL7, which all provide terminfo from ncurses 5.x.
Signed-off-by Hollis Blanchard <[email protected]>
Committed to 2018.02.x and 2018.05.x, thanks.
Hmm, this triggers an interesting issue with tic :/
** Building terminfo database, please wait... Running sh ./shlib tic to install /usr/share/terminfo ...
You may see messages regarding extended capabilities, e.g., AX. These are extended terminal capabilities which are compiled using
tic -x
If you have ncurses 4.2 applications, you should read the INSTALL document, and install the terminfo without the -x option.
"terminfo.tmp", line 21272, terminal 'v3220': /home/peko/.terminfo: permission denied (errno 30)
What happens here is that tic doesn't have write access to /usr/share/terminfo (as we are not root), so instead it writes the db to ~/.terminfo.

Quoted 5 lines

We in general don't want buildroot to touch any files outside the buildroot output directory (and $TMPDIR), but it normally isn't enforced/checked by the autobuilders. For this specific setup with building inside a container $HOME is mounted readonly, so it really fails.

Actually, sounds like a good idea to have an autobuilder that does exactly
this: nothing writeable outside of OUTPUT_DIR.

Quoted 7 lines

The question is how to fix it. The logical solution would be to set TERMINFO to get it to put the database somewhere else, but that doesn't work because run_tic.sh overwrites it:
# don't use user's TERMINFO variable
TERMINFO=${DESTDIR}$ticdir ; export TERMINFO

           ^^^^^^^^^^

So, set DESTDIR?

Or actually, why is this script called at all? The whole point of Hollis's
patch was to use the system's terminfo, so why should we generate the terminfo at all? In other words, can't we just pass --disable-db-install ?

Regards,
Arnout

Quoted 7 lines

The only fix I can think of is:
HOST_NCURSES_MAKE_ENV += HOME=$(HOST_DIR)
But that isn't very nice. Any other ideas?

Signature · 6 lines

Arnout Vandecappelle                          arnout at mind be
Senior Embedded Software Architect            +32-16-286500
Essensium/Mind                                http://www.mind.be
G.Geenslaan 9, 3001 Leuven, Belgium           BE 872 984 063 RPR Leuven
LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/arnoutvandecappelle
GPG fingerprint:  7493 020B C7E3 8618 8DEC 222C 82EB F404 F9AC 0DDF

Hollis Blanchard

author

2018-08-09 00:19 UTC #7 lore raw

PATCH 1/1 ncurses: make host-ncurses use host terminfo

Quoted 5 lines · Arnout Vandecappelle

Quoted 4 lines · Peter Korsgaard
The question is how to fix it. The logical solution would be to set TERMINFO to get it to put the database somewhere else, but that doesn't work because run_tic.sh overwrites it:

Quoted 8 lines

Quoted 2 lines
# don't use user's TERMINFO variable
TERMINFO=${DESTDIR}$ticdir ; export TERMINFO
            ^^^^^^^^^^
So, set DESTDIR?
Or actually, why is this script called at all? The whole point of Hollis's
patch was to use the system's terminfo, so why should we generate the terminfo at all? In other words, can't we just pass --disable-db-install ?

I agree that we don't want to generate terminfo in the /host/ ncurses. I can confirm that adding --disable-db-install fixes the build behavior that I also see (building host-ncurses writes to my ~/.terminfo).

I can't imagine a problem, but I just haven't yet been able to rebuild a full toolchain with --disable-db-install.

Hollis Blanchard
Mentor Graphics Emulation Division

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Peter Korsgaard

2018-08-09 14:28 UTC #8 lore raw

PATCH 1/1 ncurses: make host-ncurses use host terminfo

In reply to Arnout Vandecappelle

Quoted 1 line

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"Arnout" == Arnout Vandecappelle <[email protected]> writes:

Hi,

Quoted 8 lines

Quoted 5 lines
We in general don't want buildroot to touch any files outside the buildroot output directory (and $TMPDIR), but it normally isn't enforced/checked by the autobuilders. For this specific setup with building inside a container $HOME is mounted readonly, so it really fails.
Actually, sounds like a good idea to have an autobuilder that does exactly
this: nothing writeable outside of OUTPUT_DIR.

Indeed. I will try to find (time and cpu) cycles to setup such a builder.

Quoted 9 lines

Quoted 7 lines
The question is how to fix it. The logical solution would be to set TERMINFO to get it to put the database somewhere else, but that doesn't work because run_tic.sh overwrites it:
# don't use user's TERMINFO variable
TERMINFO=${DESTDIR}$ticdir ; export TERMINFO
           ^^^^^^^^^^
So, set DESTDIR?

That isn't really handy as DESTDIR is used in a bunch of other places and this is built as part of make install.

Quoted 3 lines

Or actually, why is this script called at all? The whole point of Hollis's
patch was to use the system's terminfo, so why should we generate the terminfo at all? In other words, can't we just pass --disable-db-install ?

Ahh, I hadn't noticed that option. That indeed works, I'll send a patch
- Thanks!

Signature · 1 line

Bye, Peter Korsgaard