[arch-general] Is ncurses in Arch Linux out-dated?

[Maarten de Vries]

On 21 August 2016 at 15:40, Chi Hsuan Yen via arch-general <
arch-general at archlinux.org> wrote:

> Hi Archers,
>
> ncurses 6.0 is released in 2015/08/08. It has some bugs and part of them
> are fixed. For example, I was just hit by http://bugs.python.org/
> issue27323.
> On bug-ncurses mailing list there are some patch versions. The latest one
> is 6.0-20160820:
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-ncurses/2016-08/msg00010.html. If I
> want to fix the aforementioned Python issue, should Arch Linux
>
>     1) Bump the ncurses package to 6.0-20160820, or
>     2) Just backport the relevant patch
>
> For 1), I just need to flag to package out-of-date, for 2), I have to
> submit a bug and request backporting.
>

​In general Arch Linux packagers don't really do back porting. They try to
stay as close to upstream releases as possible. So the best thing you can
do is flag the package as out-of-date. If you don't want to wait for the
packagers, you can use ABS [1] to download the PKGBUILD and modify it to to
your need in the mean time.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Build_System

Hope this helps,
Maarten de Vries