There are two binary-incompatible options which we need to wait for a SONAME change to enable: --enable-ext-colors (will switch to soversion 6) --enable-ext-mouse The configure test for the size of chtype_t was broken up until 5.4-7. It would be nice to remove --disable-lp64, --with-chtype, and --with-mmask-t, but that is an incompatible change. The wide-character version of ncurses is basically mature at this point. At the next binary incompatible change, there may be no more reason to ship separate packages for it.