Re: [Caml-list] Caml toplevel and readline

[Sven LUTHER <luther@dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr>]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2001 at 02:37:21AM +1000, John Max Skaller wrote:
> I find the ocaml top level 'ocaml' very clumbsy to use,
> compared with, say, Python's top level, because it
> doesn't understand line editing. Any chance of optionally
> building it with gnu_readline?

Note :

There is also libeditline as an option. It comes under an BSD without ad
clause, and as thus is prefectly compatible with the current ocaml code and is
source-cod compatible with the basic features of readline.

If you want to use libreadline, well, the toplevel parts must be released
under a GPL compatible licence, which i suppose will not happen. It could be
possible to do some tricks to offer at configuration time the ability to link
with libreadline, so that people can built it for themselves, but not
distribute it. I don't know how much work this is and if the caml team may be
willing to apply a patch providing such.

One could imagine a default build using libeditline and a switch for linking
against libreadline, but disabled by default, and with a warning about the non
distribuability of it.

In the end the ledit option seems the more attractive, being written in ocaml
and all. I would love to have it included in the base ocaml tarball.

Friendly,

Sven Luther
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