readline on macs

[Ian Lynagh]

On Mon, Jan 07, 2008 at 09:19:25AM -0800, Judah Jacobson wrote:
> On Jan 7, 2008 6:55 AM, Christian Maeder <Christian.Maeder at dfki.de> wrote:
> > Judah Jacobson wrote:
> > > On Jan 5, 2008 10:29 AM, Thorkil Naur <naur at post11.tele.dk> wrote:
> > >>> The alternative is to use static linking of gmp (as suggested by chak)
> > >>> _and_ readline (version 5), so that user programs are also statically
> > >>> linked with these libs.
> >
> > I just have succeeded in linking ghc-6.8.2 statically with libreadline.a
> > and libncurses.a in the compiler directory by setting:
> 
> Readline is distributed under the GPL, not the LGPL (which gmp is).
> Does the above cause a licensing problem? (I don't have much
> experience in that area; hopefully someone can explain this issues
> involved.)

Perhaps the best answer is for someone to make editline bindings for
Haskell?

I believe this would solve the problem twice: OS X comes with editline,
and it's BSD licensed so we can happily statically link against it. The
latter may help us on Windows too.

Everything I know about editline is third-hand, but AIUI the APIs are
very similar, so it shouldn't be hard to alter GHC to use editline
instead.


Thanks
Ian