KTOR-7909 docs: update Linux instructions in contributing.md #4529
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…g guide - Replace outdated 'libncurses5' packages with 'libncurses-dev' and 'libtinfo-dev' to ensure compatibility with Ubuntu 20.04 and later. - Use 'apt' instead of 'apt-get' for modern best practices. - Simplify installation commands by combining them and removing explicit version numbers.
KTOR-7909 docs: update Linux instructions in contributing.md
osipxd
approved these changes
Dec 4, 2024
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@e5l, could you merge this PR ignoring required checks? |
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Hey @bsautner, thanks for the PR! LGTM |
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Thanks @e5l , @vnikolova and @osipxd - It was a small contribution but really meaningful to me to have a PR merged to main on this project. I'm a distinguished engineer at Comcast and lead mobile development here, specifically with android or kmp on iOS. Part of my role is to contribute to open source and chose to put my focus on ktor because we're using it in the xfinity android app and also I just love the project; I even have some ktor server hobby projects going. I hope I can help more! |
aochagavia
pushed a commit
to aochagavia/kson
that referenced
this pull request
Jul 7, 2025
Our linux builds recently started erroring with: ``` Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Reading state information... Done E: Unable to locate package libncurses5 Exited with code exit status 100 ``` Seems libncurses5 was deprecated and is no longer available in the repos our build uses. See [this issue along](https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/KTOR-7909/Contribution-Installation-Instructions-Replace-libncurses5-with-libncurses6-for-Ubuntu-20.04-and-Later) along with [this pull request providing its fix](ktorio/ktor#4529) for more color on this. Note: neither that issue nor the pull request were clear on why we should move to `libncurses-dev` rather than `libncurses6` so I dug into it a bit. It seems `libncurses-dev` is designed to provide a stable interface to the underlying version of libncurses, currently pointing to libncurses6. See [the package description here](https://packages.debian.org/sid/libncurses-dev) So `-dev` does indeed look like the right version for us, and should protect us from our builds suddenly breaking like this again in the future
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Subsystem
Docs
Motivation
KTOR-7909
As a new contributor, the instructions to build from source have an old version of libncurses and will result in a package not found error. This can be confusing to new contributors.
Solution