Re: Building on MacOS 10.5

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

On Sunday 28 October 2007 10:53, Dmitri A. Sergatskov wrote:
> On 10/28/07, Ethan A Merritt <merritt@u.washington.edu> wrote:
> 
> >
> > The symbol it is complaining about is in the gnu readline library,
> > or should be.  Could you please report back to us which version of
> > libreadline comes with MacOS 10.5?
> >
> 
> MacOSX does not have GNU libreadline. It comes with BSD libedit
> that has files (or symlinks) readline.h and libreadline.dylib.

I see.  That seems like a poor decision - to masquerade via symlinks
as a library that is not fully compatible.

Several people were working on a gnuplot configuration option to use
the BSD libedit library instead, but it foundered on the problem that
there were too many incompatible versions of libedit itself.

I think someone running MacOS 10.5 will need to adress this one,
ideally the people who packaged it. I would say this qualifies as a 
distribution bug.   Does Apple have a central bug reporting database? 

It sounds like the simplest fix is probably to install gnu
libreadline and remove the dubious symlinks.

-- 
Ethan A Merritt