Re: Tiger and libreadline
Re: Tiger and libreadline
- Subject: Re: Tiger and libreadline
- From: Martin Costabel <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 07 May 2005 09:41:01 +0200
Boyd Waters wrote:
On May 6, 2005, at 1:07 AM, Martin Costabel wrote:
Many GNU packages rely on libreadline.
It seems that in Darwin there is a BSD libedit, which is symlinked
as libreadline and has a corresponding readline.h. This breaks
Octave and probably other builds.
...
In addition, there is no BSD version of libreadline. BSD libedit has
been in Mac OS X since at least 10.2. The new things are the
compatibility wrappers in readline/readline.h and, and this seems to
me to be Apple's invention, the symlinks readline/history.h-
>readline.h and libreadline.dylib->libedit.2.dylib. The overall
effect is the same (licensing issues aside) as having included a very
old incompatible version of GNU readline.
I maintain that this is broken.
I used the Gentoo package manager to install readline on my Tiger
system; this replaced /usr/include/readline/* with GNU's version, and
replaced the symlink to libedit.dylib with a "real" version of
libreadline.
I did not notice any breakage of other things, but have not compiled
any Cocoa apps. The only things that I have built with xCode, since
making this change, have been device drivers - nothing that relied upon
readline.
Are there problems with installing GNU readline?
There is of course nothing wrong with installing GNU readline. Everyone
who ever compiled software on MacOSX that needed readline installed GNU
readline, whether this was done with the help of darwinports or Fink or
by compiling individually from sources.
Replacing stuff in /usr/include and /usr/lib is, however, a very bad
practice, and I will never even test gentoo, let alone use it, if it
does such things. The next minor OSX software update may very well
destroy these files without telling you.
Although, in the case at hand, it is very tempting to trash that
annoying symlink /usr/lib/libreadline.dylib->libedit.dylib that has no
useful function whatsoever.
--
Martin
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