dialog wide-char enabled

Rodin.s has sent me some files for improving internationalization in Puppy. One of those files is 'dialog' linked against 'libncursesw', for wide-character support (such as UTF-8).

There is some history with regard to 'dialog' and wide-char support. See these two blog posts:
http://bkhome.org/archive/blog2/201103/want-to-compile-wide-char-dialog.html
http://bkhome.org/archive/blog2/201104/dialog-11-20110302-busybox-1184.html

Despite having created a PET with wide-char support, I backed off and recent Puppies have used 'dialog' linked against 'libncurses' only. I don't recall why I backed off.

Anyway, I have compiled dialog version 1.1-20111020 with wide-char support, configured as per the second link above. Here are the PETs (72KB, 15KB, 17KB):
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/pet_packages-common/dialog-1.1-20111020-widechar-w5c.pet
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/pet_packages-common/dialog_DOC-1.1-20111020-widechar-w5c.pet
http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/pet_packages-common/dialog_NLS-1.1-20111020-widechar-w5c.pet

I have put these into the 'common' repo, so that all Woof-built puppies can use them. Note, it does not require 'libtinfo'.

It is unfortunate that UTF-8 has to be enabled before dialog will display wide-characters properly. It really should recognise wide-characters regardless, so this perhaps should be reported as a bug to the dialog developer.

Tags: puppy