It would be useful for the readline package to support compiling against the libedit library (which provides a subset of the readline APIs): - libedit is available by default on OS X. - since libedit is BSD-licensed, there are no problems statically linking ghc with it. (This may be useful on Windows.) I propose adding a --with-libedit flag to the readline autoconf script. Without that flag, the package will behave exactly as before, refusing to link against libedit. With that flag, the following behavior occurs: - GNUreadline.framework (OS X - only) is ignored, if present - We try to link with -lreadline, and don't fail if readline is actually libedit. - If it is libedit, we #ifdef out all of the functions not supported by libedit. (these are generally low-level APIs not needed by most applications, including ghci.) Otherwise, if we're linking against GNU readline, we support all the available APIs. Suggested deadline: Jan. 23, 2008. A patch is attached to the trac ticket: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2028 Thoughts? -Judah