Integrating editline with ghc

[Christian Maeder]

Yitzchak Gale wrote:
> Hi Christian,
> 
> Christian Maeder wrote:
>> ...Even better if the current package readline is renamed to old-readline
>> and readline-compat to readline.
> 
> I have been trying to understand why you want to do
> that. What would we gain?

On Macs I want Shellac-readline to use editline, under linux we don't
have editline, so there I want to continue to use Shellac-readline as it
is now.

But I don't want to use different Haskell packages for different
platforms (for the same project).

On Macs, the only change I had to make to the Shellac-readline package
was to replace "readline >= 1.0" with "editline >= 0.1" in
Shellac-readline.cabal and "System.Console.Readline" with
"System.Console.Editline.Readline" in
src/System/Console/Shell/Backend/Readline.hs

These changes were not necessary if readline-compat supplied a module
System.Console.Readline and would be named "readline". (A better name
for old-readline would be GPL-readline, though)

I wonder how many other packages would work without changes and how many
would break, because readline-compat supplies only a part of the old
readline.

Depending on what the ghc team and the library maintainers decide,
either "readline" has to be changed to "readline-compat" in *.cabal or
(worse) we get packages Shellac-readline and Shellac-editline or (more
worse) Shellac-readline stays as is and I have to fiddle with editline
or readline on Macs myself (like now).

HTH Christian