[Box Backup-dev] Re: [Box Backup] readline support on OS X

[Martin Ebourne]

On Fri, 2006-02-17 at 12:09 +1100, Johan Allard wrote:
> So what happens is that on the Mac Apple has actually only editline  
> installed and it symlinks to make believe that it has readline, and  
> it doesn't have the include files in the right place to use editline  
> properly. Box Backup the detects libedit just fine but it doesn't  
> pickup editline/readline.h because that's not where Apple has stored  
> it. To get the Mac to do it properly we could: ln -s /usr/include/ 
> readline /usr/include/editline (and that's what I did when testing  
> it), but of course we can't get everyone to do that to get readline/ 
> editline support so we'll have to update the configure script  
> instead. Or does anyone have any other idea?

Johan,

Thanks for the explanation as to what causes the problem. Here is why I
am not planning to fix this issue (unless a safer fix can be found):

i) The suggested fix is a hack around Apple's hack. It is not at all
unlikely that some other system could have only the libraries installed
for editline, but have both headers and libraries for GNU readline. In
this case your fix is likely to cause Box to try and compile against
readline but link against editline. The resulting mess is unlikely to
work properly, and quite likely to create a support burden.

ii) Given that Apple is trying to emulate GNU readline then simply
giving --enable-gnu-readline to ./configure should get it working
correctly.

Which brings up an interesting point - what is happening about the
documentation for the new release? Since the documentation isn't in svn
we can't version it properly, so I guess it'll need to be updated at the
same time as the release is made. Should the people who made user
visible changes go and edit the wiki instructions to bring them up to
date? Before or after the release?

Cheers,

Martin.