arm-eabi-gdb depends on libncurses.so.5

[JeremyGrosser]

...but Debian stable (bullseye) installs libncurses6 by default. A libncurses5 package is available, but Alire does not install it automatically.

alr exec arm-eabi-gdb bin/hello_pico
/home/synack/.config/alire/cache/dependencies/gnat_arm_elf_11.2.4_ba16d45c/bin/arm-eabi-gdb: error while loading shared libraries: libncurses.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

sudo apt install libncurses5 fixes this error.

[Fabien-Chouteau]

We could add an external dependency on libncurses5 in the gnat_* crates.

[JeremyGrosser]

That would work, although I think it might be better if we could get ncurses statically linked so that we're less dependent on the host environment.

[JeremyGrosser]

I looked into this a little bit and learned a few things:

• ncurses 6.x is ABI compatible with 5.x, but adds some new features (not sure if gdb is using any of those, but I doubt it)
• gdb depends on ncurses for the TUI feature, which the spec for gdb already disables on Windows
• readline also links ncurses if it's available, so we get this dependency even without TUI
• adding -static to LDFLAGS causes gdb's configure script to not detect ncurses at all
• ncurses needs terminfo files as well, so even if we statically link it, we'll need to ship more stuff in the binary package

So, I think your suggestion of just adding a dependency on libncurses5 is the best option. Hopefully the distros maintain this compatibility package until gdb gets bumped up to libncurses6.