[Haskell-cafe] Poor first impression

[ls-haskell-developer-2006 at m-e-leypold.de]

brad clawsie <clawsie at fastmail.fm> writes:

>>  4) The fix to the "bug" is simply download and install the libreadline4 
>>  shared object.  No recompilation or reinstallation necessary.
>
> i'm not sure if this has been addressed - but is there a specific
> reason an older version of the readline library is in use? v5 appears
> to be stable and has been in use for some time now.

Actually some sources recommend to just symlink libreadline.so.4 to
libreadline.so.5. I haven't tried, but since version 5 is supposed to
be upwards compatible to version 4 it's reasonable to expect that it
works (to a certain extend).

To me (as an outsider) the whole thing certainly looks like a
quirk/buglet in the ghc build process (why not just link to the
available readline?), but IMO that is no reason for a "ghc is not ripe
for prime time" outcry. Ghc is for programmers and there is a certain
extend of ability to help yourself I'd be expecting from
programmers. If one doesn't have it, he/she should just use the
packages of his/her distro or another distro.

Regards -- Markus