On Jan 27, 2008 6:23 PM, Manuel M T Chakravarty
Ian Lynagh:
I think GHC should just always use editline. We already need to support using an in-tree editline for Windows, so we can also use it on other platforms where editline isn't easily available or is too old. Also supporting readline just makes the build system more complicated for little extra benefit, and also means that there are more configurations to bitrot.
Sure if you want to add another library into the tree that's an option. However, I am not so sure whether it's going to be as easy as with GMP. AFAIK libedit (which is the editline port used in Linux distributions - http://www.thrysoee.dk/editline/) needs (n)curses. Their web page says somebody managed to compile on cygwin, but there is no mention of mingw. So, before committing to use editline/libedit on all platforms, it might be useful to make sure editline compiles fine everywhere.
You may have seen this already, but it looks like libedit doesn't work on mingw: http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A-Integrating-editline-with-ghc-p14925360.html However, we already don't use readline on mingw, right? So I don't think that should be a strike against using editline exclusively. Also, a small correction: both readline and libedit only need termcap, not curses (which provides a termcap interface). -Judah