I considered static builds to work around the problem of debian shipping a castrated ncurses that doesn’t support mouse wheel up
The whole ncurses gpm thing is a mess indeed, on Debian and Debian derivatives… additionally it can be annoying to get it building on older distros, which is exactly what bites me sometimes when support clients. Landing on Ubuntu 12.04 or 14.04 isn’t that unusual… even with 12.04 being EOL like last year.
There is also the problem that you really want the bundled scripts too, so the best solution would be to lobby distros to package kakoune.
True about the bundled scripts. I think Kakoune is still moving quick enough getting packagers to support it is tough. But as I am writing this comment, I wonder how much headway we could make with just a snap and a flatpak… Snaps work back to 14.04 Ubuntu at this point.