site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 (Macintosh/20041206) 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- The first few lines of readline.h are: /* $NetBSD: readline.h,v 1.11 2004/01/17 17:57:40 christos Exp $ */ /*- * Copyright (c) 1997 The NetBSD Foundation, Inc. * All rights reserved. -- Martin _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... Bill Northcott wrote: On May 6, 2005, at 1:07 AM, Martin Costabel wrote: [] So it does not look a bit like an Apple invention. You did not read what I wrote. The compatibility wrapper in the readline.h file is BSD, but the two symlinks introducing additional files "history.h" and "libreadline.dylib" are not. It is these two symlinks that make configure scripts falsely detect GNU readline when it is not present. This is the bug. These symlinks have no useful function; I know of no software that would use a "-lreadline" linker flag and expect to link to BSD libedit. Having some sort of readline compatibility layer on top of BSD libedit is very different from pretending to *be* readline. The header is very clear about what is and what is not implemented. So this most definitely NOT a bug. Some people might like it done differently, but others would probably rather stick with BSD licensed software rather than have basic libraries under GPL. This is true, in particular since GNU readline has been used in the past by the FSF to leverage acceptance of the GPL for projects using readline. As I said before it does what it says on the tin. Darwin is a BSD derivative UNIX not a GNU system. Get used to it. After all libreadline is just a tool box, none of which is really vital to the function of an application. If you want to port software to Darwin, arrange to not call the unimplemented functions. If you want to use GNU Linux then use GNU Linux. Have a look at *BSD distributions. They use GNU readline, too, see for instance http://pkgsrc.netbsd.se/?cat=latest&name=readline. This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com