readline problems on OSX

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Thursday 25 January 2007 12:52, Per Persson wrote:
> 
> 1) The readline issue is caused by someone at Apple having the  
> "bright" idea to symlink /usr/lib/libreadline.dylib to /usr/lib/ 
> libedit.dylib
> (The reason for not including readline are license terms, only BSD/ 
> LGPL/etc. in OS X not GPL)
> 
> However, using ./configure  --with-readline=/path/to/your/gnu/ 
> libreadline should work if libreadline is installed somewhere.

Aha.  So gnuplot's configure script is correct, but OSX is lying to it.
Wonderful.  I don't think we can fix this on the gnuplot end, except
maybe by making a special case of OSX (which of course the 
autoconf tools do not want you to do).

On the bright side, does this mean that OSX contains a usable
version of libedit?  We were already experimenting with adding
that as a ./configure option, but couldn't find a copy of libedit that
actually worked :-(      

If OSX really does have a working version, then I suppose we could
test first for libedit, and only test for gnu readline after that.
That might work, and would not be specific to OSX.   
But only if libedit actually works, of course.

> I'll update my gnuplot sources now, and have a look at (1).

Great.  While you're at it, maybe you could have a look at  patchset 
#1504831 which attempts to use libedit as an alternative to readline.
Note the warning about a name conflict with routine term_init().

	thanks for the insight!