Re: [HACKERS] Should libedit be preferred to libreadline?

Chris Browne <cbbrowne(at)acm(dot)org> writes:
> To my mind, giving BIG weight to the opinions of the relatively small
> set of individuals that manage PostgreSQL packages for the popular
> distributions of Linux and *BSD seems fairly appropriate.

The packagers are bright enough to adapt to whatever we do --- it's
the people who build their own from source that I'm worried about.
--with-readline has worked fine for libedit users for a long time,
and suddenly changing its semantics strikes me as a bad idea.

The other problem with the "let's be deterministic" argument is that
it rests on a fallacy, which is that configure can reliably tell the
difference between libreadline and libedit. Darwin, for example, goes
to some lengths to confuse matters.

(I think I'd actually be for the determinism point of view if it could
provide an #ifdef flag saying which library is in use --- then we could
fix the write_history return value problem we're seeing on Darwin ---
but I don't think we can do it short of a behavioral probe during
configure.)

regards, tom lane