two questions

Hi. I'm a newcomer to this list so if the problems that bother me were
discussed/FAQ'ed/archived somewhere please direct me there.

Recently I tried to use ncurses for the first time and was puzzled by
the following:

a) I cannot understand ncurses version numbering policy at all. First,
why the library version is 1.9.9g but sonames are numbered 3.4? It
would make sense if ncurses, panel, menu and form had individual
revisions with single "release version" for them all; but they are
same. Second, why soname includes what is generally regarded as "minor
version number"? After I figured out that 3.0 (aka 1.9.9e on my
RedHat4.0) is too buggy for my purposes (something weird with wsyncup)
I decided to upgrade and soon found out that everything that needs
ncurses is linked against lib*.3.0 and new libraries are lib*.3.4;
naturally, dynamic linker does not find them (I did "ln -s lib*.3.4
lib*.3.0" to fix it). May be they are indeed incompatible? I've run
minicom, mutt, aumix, top--everything seems to work though.

b) In version 3.4 (that is 1.9.9g) if I do *not* call

  keypad(stdscr, TRUE);

in the beginning (soon after initscr()) newwin() and new_menu() always
return NULL, while new_item() works OK. 3.0 had no such requirement.
Before I start looking into the code, is it a known problem?

BTW, in misc/ncurses-intro.html there's </A> missing which breaks the
rest of the document when viewed with Lynx. Also in misc/hackguide.html
two anchors are misspelled. Should post fixes for those here?

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