On 11/21/08, Simon Marlow
I propose we do this:
* extract the GHCi UI from the GHC package, put it in the ghc-bin package (maybe we should rename this package to ghc-main or something). This removes the editline and bytestring (for now) dependencies from the GHC package.
* Move to Haskeline for the default build. We have to bring in terminfo and utf8-string as bootlibs.
This gives us line-editing on Windows, and removes problematic external C library dependencies.
Just so it's clear, Haskeline on POSIX does require (n)curses, an external C library, in order to access terminfo capabilities portably. But in my experience curses is much more widely available by default than readline or editline, so I still think this is a significant improvement.
* Make it possible to compile the ghc-bin package against readline. Upload ghc-bin to Hackage, so people can say cabal install ghc-bin -f readline and get a GHCi built against readline if they want. Oops - except that this would mean that the ghc-main package has a variant license. So maybe we have to have a separate ghc-readline package?
That sounds reasonable. As a side note, I'm very interested to learn of any more issues with Haskeline that would make it less preferable than the readline backend. -Judah