Hello,
2008/11/21 John O'Donnell
Simon says...
Could we reduce GHC's surface area by just using haskeline and dumping readline/editline support altogether?
I'm in favor of doing this. For portability and consistency, it's better to have just one version that is unencumbered by these license issues, as long as it works on the main platforms (including Macintosh - has that been tested?).
It works very well on my Mac. Both tab completion of quoted filenames in Haskell expressions and of unicode identifiers works well. (It doesn't complete non-latin file names, but I can live with that.) I've also noticed that with haskeline one can type in ghci non-latin characters, as was the case before, with readline, but not anymore with editline. Hope it helps C.Chryssochoidis
If ghc tries to support both readline and editline, along with haskeline, applications written in Haskell will have different behaviours depending on the combination (platform,line-editor). Better just to simplify.
John O'Donnell
-----Original Message----- From: glasgow-haskell-users-bounces@haskell.org on behalf of Simon Peyton-Jones Sent: Fri 2008-11-21 10:39 To: Simon Marlow; Judah Jacobson Cc: glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org Subject: RE: ghci-haskeline (was: Re: ANNOUNCE: GHC version 6.10.1 - EditLine / terminal incompatibility?)
| > I've actually been experimenting with something similar: | > | > darcs get http://code.haskell.org/~judah/ghci-haskeline/ .... | > | > Current benefits over the readline/editline versions: | > - Works on Windows | | I can attest to that. Nice going Judah! | | $ cabal update | $ darcs get http://code.haskell.org/~judah/ghci-haskeline/ | $ cd ghci-haskeline | $ cabal install | | and I have a GHCi on Windows that can do completion, history search, and | exits when I hit ^D. That's made my day.
If I had £1 for every email I've seen in the last decade about platform-related or license-related problems with readline and now editline, I'd be rich man. Super rich.
Could we reduce GHC's surface area by just using haskeline and dumping readline/editline support altogether? Yes that might reduce functionality slightly -- readline/editline are complicated for good reasons. But it's increase functionality in other ways (as Judah says), and by giving us one piece of software that we understand, and can distribute with GHC, it might remove a whole class of problems.
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