Broken with >=ncurses-6.4_p20230408 (OpenRC abuses tparm API)

[thesamesam]

OpenRC is broken with >=sys-libs/ncurses-6.4_p20230408, like so:

openrc-0.46-build/src/einfo $ ./ewarn hi
 (null)*(null) hi(null)

This was originally reported in Gentoo at https://bugs.gentoo.org/904277. The ncurses maintainer, Thomas Dickey, provided some analysis (see the Gentoo bug for full details):

I see that OpenRC is passing hardcoded strings to tgoto(),
which do not come from the terminal database (when tgoto()
returns a null, indicating a failure for that capability),
and using the output of tgoto() to copy/use other places.

That's a defect in OpenRC. Perhaps they'll fix it.

OpenRC needs to use tputs, printw, etc instead of e.g. printf for strings obtained from ncurses.

Note that newer ncurses is needed to fix some security vulnerabilities (https://bugs.gentoo.org/904247), so there's some urgency to this.

[vapier]

i don't super care whether we switch to the full curses API or hardcode ANSI sequences. our usage is so low that we can get by with ANSI. all we really need is logic to determine whether we should be using sequences at all (e.g. the "dumb" terminal or a pipe).

[bfrg]

I'm on Gentoo Linux and because of this "bug" I cannot install newer tmux version, since OpenRC requires the old ncurses version but that conflicts with the latest tmux. This is true for every application that requires a newer ncurses. IMO something as essential as OpenRC should NOT depend on ncurses.