On Dec 21, 2007, at 3:40 PM, Thorkil Naur wrote:
1. Which readline do we use? GNU readline, of course. As opposed to the readline installed as /usr/include/readline/*.h and /usr/lib/libreadline.dylib on our PPC Mac OS X machines which are said to be (and can even be observed to be) symbolic links to something called libedit and which, to me, never has managed to provide something suitable for use by GHC. But what is GNU readline, then? I don't exactly know, but my best guess is something like ftp://ftp.cwru.edu/pub/bash/readline-5.2.tar.gz . I never tried to install GNU readline directly from this file. On some occasions, I have installed readline from mac ports. Although I am fairly confident that what was installed was some version of the GNU readline, I am not sure. On other occasions, I have installed GNU readline from various sources related to GHC, some times known to me, at other times not.
I should point out that other components on Mac OS X successfully use libedit for readline functionality. While I agree fully with the desire to have full readline functionality in libedit, would it make sense for GHC to offer an option to use Mac OS X's native "readline", with concomitant loss of functionality? Some users might prefer giving up some function in return for one less thing to be installed external to GHC. I probably would. Just a thought... Deborah