[PATCH] ncurses: Introduce configs to install ncurses progs

[Jonas Gorski]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2026 at 5:19 AM Charlie Jenkins
<thecharlesjenkins at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ncurses ships with a variety of programs: clear, infocmp, tabs, tic,
> toe, tput, and tset/reset. Introduce configs to build/install each of
> these programs individually. clear and reset commands are also supplied
> by busybox, so these two are gated on the commands not being included by
> busybox. The ncurses version of reset and clear will read the terminfo
> to more accurately execute these commands.

How much do these increase the build time? If not too much, maybe just
always build them and package them as individual packages? Then this
becomes a runtime decision and not a build-time decision to include
them (and you can just use the image builder to include them).

>
> Signed-off-by: Charlie Jenkins <thecharlesjenkins at gmail.com>
> ---
>  package/libs/ncurses/Config.in | 69 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  package/libs/ncurses/Makefile  | 48 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++--
>  2 files changed, 115 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/package/libs/ncurses/Config.in b/package/libs/ncurses/Config.in
> index a18224c30c..9a8eae5e46 100644
> --- a/package/libs/ncurses/Config.in
> +++ b/package/libs/ncurses/Config.in
> @@ -9,5 +9,74 @@ config LIBNCURSES_TERMINFO
>           Whitespace separated list of terminfo files to install
>           beyond the default terminfo files.
>
> +config LIBNCURSES_PROGS
> +       bool
> +       help
> +         Build ncurses with support for it's programs such as tic, clear,
> +         reset, tabs, etc.
> +
> +         Busybox ships its own version of clear and reset, so those must be
> +         disabled before trying to enable this option.
> +
> +config LIBNCURSES_INSTALL_CLEAR
> +       bool "install clear"
> +       depends on !BUSYBOX_CONFIG_CLEAR

Instead of depending on this, this should just be setup as an
alternative with a higher priority.

(snip)

Regards,
Jonas