Integrating editline with ghc

[Christian Maeder]

(my previous mail went to the bugs list by accident)

Christian Maeder wrote:
> I would like to know from package maintainers if there packages can be
> easily ported from libreadline to libedit.
> 
> The best indication for this would be if the package is also happy with
> a restricted interface of readline (i.e. readline-compat) or requires
> the full GNU readline.
> 
> At least testing this compatibility makes sense using a readline package
> with a temporarily reduced interface (without the need to change the
> packages depending on readline.)

In short, consider a split up of the readline package into
readline-basics and readline-exts (both with GPL licence). Unfortunately
it is not possible to have the package readline to be the union of
readline-basics and readline-exts. So readline-basic (or
readline-compat) would be a duplication of a reduced readline package.

For porting packages from libreadline to libedit it would be sufficient
to replace readline-basics with editline (and change the licence) in
*.cabal files. Packages depending on more then readline-basics cannot be
ported.

I'm only worried if any package maintainer would bother to change the
build-depends from readline to readline-basic (if not forced to change
it anyway, i.e. to readline-basic and readline-ext).

Alternatively, if the interface of readline is reduced to that of
readline-basic, package maintainers could hope that their package is
still okay and if not (after compilation errors) add readline-ext to
their build-depends.

Is this really such a crazy idea?

Christian