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Solaris has both traditional System V curses and an XPG4-compatible
curses that does include mvwchgat. The traditional system V curses is
the default, for backward compatibility.
If you want the XPG4 compatible curses, you need to make sure
-I/usr/xpg4/include and -L/usr/xpg4/lib -R/usr/xpg4/lib (or their 64-bit
equivalents) are in CPPFLAGS/CFLAGS/LDFLAGS so that the XPG4 curses is
discovered. See the man page for mvwchgat(3XCURSES) on Solaris for more
info.
The difficulty for Python is that it also tries to build a readline
module, and the libreadline was more than likely linked against the
default system V curses. That means that if you add the -I and -L/-R
flags to get XPG4 curses for all of the Python build, you'll probably
get a link failure or worse when building the readline module.
There are at least two ways around this:
- rebuild readline to use XPG4 curses, and then rebuild every single
 application that links against readline. Then build Python, using
 the -I and -L/-R flags to get XPG4 curses for the entire Python build.
- modify the setup.py for the _curses module so that
 logic is added for Solaris to look for the XPG4 curses only during
 the build of the _curses module.
There is, however, no XPG4 panels library, since panels was not part of
the XPG4 specification. That means that with the appropriate Python
code in setup.py it would be possible to build _curses against XPG4
curses lib, but _curses_panel either couldn't be built or would have to
somehow be linked against the standard (system V) panel library and the
standard curses library.