Unable to install ncurses

[Nam Nguyen]

Hi all,

Recently I ran into problems creating a new conda environment on my CentOS Linux 7 (Core) machine, mostly due to ncurses failing to be installed.  I'm running conda 4.9.2.  

When I run

> conda create -n python3.7 python=3.7

I see the following error messages (see log.txt for full error messages):

.....

CondaVerificationError: The package for ncurses located at /home/shared/programs/miniconda3_11_16_2020/pkgs/ncurses-6.2-he6710b0_1

appears to be corrupted. The path 'share/terminfo/2/2621a'

specified in the package manifest cannot be found.

CondaVerificationError: The package for ncurses located at /home/shared/programs/miniconda3_11_16_2020/pkgs/ncurses-6.2-he6710b0_1

appears to be corrupted. The path 'share/terminfo/E/Eterm'

specified in the package manifest cannot be found.

.....

Closer inspection shows that these bolded files are not present in the extracted folder.  The odd part is, though, if I manually extract the downloaded tar.bz2 archive, these files do exist.   In order to compare these differences, I compared the list of files in the conda-extracted directory (files_extracted.txt) with the list of files from the manual tar -jxf command (files_fresh.txt) and found that for whatever reason, conda is ignoring the case sensitivity of the file names.  For example, the conda-extracted files only contains the directory share/terminfo/E/, where as the manual tar extracted files contains both share/terminfo/E/ and share/terminfo/e/.

The file system I am using can handle case-sensitive file names, and I am at a complete lost why manaul extraction of the tar results in the correct behavior, but however conda is handling is not working.  What's very odd was I didn't have any problems for the past few months until about 2 weeks ago.  The only thing I can imagine is, somehow, some setting is causing conda to not recognize that the file names are case sensitive.  

Has anyone ever encountered something like this and how to go about fixing it?  

Regards,

Nam