(my previous mail went to the bugs list by accident) Christian Maeder wrote:
I would like to know from package maintainers if there packages can be easily ported from libreadline to libedit.
The best indication for this would be if the package is also happy with a restricted interface of readline (i.e. readline-compat) or requires the full GNU readline.
At least testing this compatibility makes sense using a readline package with a temporarily reduced interface (without the need to change the packages depending on readline.)
In short, consider a split up of the readline package into readline-basics and readline-exts (both with GPL licence). Unfortunately it is not possible to have the package readline to be the union of readline-basics and readline-exts. So readline-basic (or readline-compat) would be a duplication of a reduced readline package. For porting packages from libreadline to libedit it would be sufficient to replace readline-basics with editline (and change the licence) in *.cabal files. Packages depending on more then readline-basics cannot be ported. I'm only worried if any package maintainer would bother to change the build-depends from readline to readline-basic (if not forced to change it anyway, i.e. to readline-basic and readline-ext). Alternatively, if the interface of readline is reduced to that of readline-basic, package maintainers could hope that their package is still okay and if not (after compilation errors) add readline-ext to their build-depends. Is this really such a crazy idea? Christian