This is always a controversial topic, but I suggest to start using a configure script and Makefiles instead of the shell scripts.
The reason behind this is that we'd get checks, defines (like for the curses parts) and also conditional compilation and linking (like pipcurses only if curses was not requested [or, if we can make curses the default, only if curses was not not found]).
What do you think?
I may be able to do the initial kick-off for this, if I knew that this will be both useful and accepted.
I think, it's not needed for such a small project, but if you want to create such ./configure files, go ahead and add them to svn.
Maybe it might be useful in the future :)