The good news is that I've just made it slightly simpler, at least if
you're running from git. I've published an "ncursesw" branch that
contains a hacked ncurses-0.9.1 and a dirty script to install it into
your ../lib/ directory. If you use that AND you run from git next,
you'll see wide characters. It works!
So, just a "few" "simple" commands:
$ git branch --track ncursesw origin/ncursesw
$ git checkout ncursesw
$ cd ncurses-0.9.1/
$ ./run-this-for-sup.sh
$ cd ..
$ git checkout next
$ ruby -Ilib bin/sup
... and you should see wide characters, assuming your terminal is
capable. If make dies, you probably need to install some kind of
ncursesw development library. On my Debian system it's
a package called libncursesw5-dev.