I'm building ncurses 6.1 from source for some reasons. First I configure the sources with
./configure
and then I build it with
make
both without arguments. When I try to run tests I get the error message
Error opening terminal: xterm-256color.
on my local system (Ubuntu 17.10) and
Error opening terminal: xterm
on the build server (Jenkins Docker container).
I found out that this build is looking for terminal descriptions in /usr/share/terminfo/. There are many descriptions but no xterm-256color on my local system. On the build server the folder /usr/share/terminfo/ is empty. I found xterm-256color and xterm at /lib/terminfo. When I install ncurses with package manager (apt for Ubuntu 17.10), it works. So I assume that this package chooses the right path. I copied xterm-256color resp. xterm from /lib/terminfo to /usr/share/terminfo/ and my build works on both systems now. Why do two different paths exist and why do these two versions of ncurses choose two different paths? I need a conan package of ncurses that works out of the box without copying description files.
This could be a duplicate of: How to set custom search paths for the terminfo database when building ncurses from source
The answer is in the summary at the end of configure (which isn't shown in the question). But running infocmp -D will show the directories that infocmp would use when looking for descriptions.
You can modify the behavior using the TERMINFO and TERMINFO_DIRS environment variables.
The /lib/terminfo is Debian-specific (Ubuntu doesn't provide any changes for ncurses; they simply recompile the Debian packages: most Ubuntu bug reports for ncurses deal with their problems in doing that).
Debian by default installs someone's notion of a minimal terminal database in that directory. Install ncurses-term to get a full terminal database.
By the way, compiling and installing ncurses on Debian/Ubuntu/other systems with ncurses already installed runs a risk of breaking the existing libraries which are used (for example) by bash and other utilities that you probably need.