Much ado about libedit [Re: Alternatives to gcc (was Re: gcc 4.3: when will it becomestandard compiler?)]

[Garrett Cooper]

On Feb 1, 2009, at 1:01 AM, Stefan Farfeleder wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 01, 2009 at 12:55:20PM +1300, James Butler wrote:
>> 2009/2/1 Mark Linimon <linimon at lonesome.com>:
>>> On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 01:08:54PM -0800, Pedro F. Giffuni wrote:
>>>> The effort didn't go far enough. Why haven't we removed GNU  
>>>> readline ?
>>>
>>> Probably either because someone hasn't written a BSD-licensed one,  
>>> or
>>> someone hasn't done the work to test-compile src and ports on all  
>>> the
>>> appropriate architectures.
>>
>> This might be off topic, but NetBSD has (limited) readline
>> compatibility in their libedit (which FreeBSD has in ports I think) -
>> this also gives them tab-completion in /bin/sh :-)
>
> I once posted a patch which ports it to FreeBSD.  It would need a  
> lot of
> work to fix all ports though.

	libedit isn't feature complete with GNU readline and many things will  
fail to compile with NetBSD's rip on readline. Believe me -- I tried  
with python -_-...
	Then again at least you can make GNU readline into a port for things  
that need it (like Python's readline module).
	And yes, we do already have libedit in the base source tree under lib/ 
libedit -- it's just extremely outdated (hence libreadline isn't  
available after compiling libedit).
Cheers,
-Garrett