Proposal: Add --with-libedit flag to the readline package

[Judah Jacobson]

On Jan 11, 2008 7:56 AM, Ian Lynagh <igloo at earth.li> wrote:
>
> Hi Judah,
>
> On Wed, Jan 09, 2008 at 10:08:20AM -0800, Judah Jacobson wrote:
> >
> >  - If it is libedit, we #ifdef out all of the functions not supported
> > by libedit. (these are generally low-level APIs not needed by most
> > applications, including ghci.) Otherwise, if we're linking against GNU
> > readline, we support all the available APIs.
> >
> > Thoughts?
>
> I agree with Thorkil's message to the bug report (although I think the
> library name should be libedit or editline - I'm a bit confused about
> the relationship of the two).
>
> If a Haskell library or program has a build-depends on readline, then it
> should get the same functions everywhere; otherwise dependencies are
> meaningless.

OK, you both have convinced me.  I'll get to work on an editline
library.  (From looking at the documentation such as "man editline", I
think that is what it should be named.)  I've applied for the project
to be hosted on community.haskell.org.

Basic features: (let me know if you think I'm wrong here)
- Licensed under BSD3 (the readline package itself is licensed under
GPL since it links against libreadline).
- Link with -ledit (instead of -lreadline).
- To start with, provide one module, System.Console.Editline.Readline.
 That module will be mostly a cut-and-paste of all the functions from
System.Console.Readline which are supported by editline (version 5.1,
as distributed on OS X 10.4).
- In the future, we can provide System.Console.Editline which provides
the non-readline APIs.


-Judah