[Box Backup-dev] Building in readline support

[Martin Ebourne]

On Mon, 2005-12-26 at 10:48 +0000, James O'Gorman wrote:
> On 26/12/05 00:53, Martin Ebourne wrote:
> According to man 3 editline, #include <histedit.h> is required. This 
> exists in /usr/include but instead of an editline subdir there is a 
> readline subdir, which contains readline.h:

>From looking at the cvs repositories I can see that NetBSD has had
readline emulation in its libedit for 5 years, and although FreeBSD sync
with NetBSD it appears they have not copied that functionality across.
Looks like OpenBSD might be similar. Darwin appears to have the
emulation.

Your libedit is clearly lacking the readline emulation. One option would
be to modify box to be able to work with the editline interface, though
I'm not planning to do that.

I've looked at the licensing issue again and it is unclear. If box is
linked statically against readline then that is definitely a licence
violation. If it is linked dynamically (as usual) then that is not clear
cut. GNU say that is also a violation, and a number of companies (eg.
MySQL) rely on exactly that to force their customers to buy licenses.
However some people disagree, and I've just noticed that redhat ship
PostgreSQL (bsd licence) dynamically linked against readline in Fedora.

Given the confusion (and RedHat's lead) I'll probably set the RPM up to
link against readline. Feel free to do as you please for FreeBSD. Unless
others disagree I'll leave the current configure warning in Box to
distance it from readline.

Cheers,

Martin.