Christian Maeder wrote:
Simon Marlow wrote:
Judah Jacobson wrote:
I've actually put together a readline-compat package like you described:
http://code.haskell.org/readline-compat This is not the way to go, IMO. As Manuel said, we don't want packages with licenses that depend on the way the package is built. The readline-compat package above has this problem, and the only way to fix it is to make its license GPL. But presumably that's exactly what you don't want to do, because the purpose of using editline is to avoid the GPL.
My major aim was to avoid that users of our software need to install the GNUReadline.framework (or libreadline) on their macs (although we could probably also link libreadline and libncurses statically.)
As far as I can see, you don't need a package with a variant license in order to do what you want. The package in question just has an option to use editline instead of readline at build-time. If you want to make life even easier, do as was suggested before and add a module with a single compatible API to both editline and readline, so clients can use the same API regardless of which package they link against.
Packages which want to use either editline or readline should say so in their .cabal files, we cannot abstract this choice into a package of its own.
You also abstract the choice between windows and unix. Doesn't that have license implications, too?
I'm not aware of any license implications - what problem specifically are you referring to? Cheers, Simon