Re: Building on MacOS 10.5

[<HBB...@t-...>]

Ethan Merritt wrote:

> In a nutshell, the problem is that Leopard ships with a gnu readline
> emulation library built on top of the BSD editline library.  But it is
> not a complete emulation, and the initialization commands are different.

Sounds like anything we would do here would be a waste of breath.  The 
bug is clearly on Apple's end of things, so Apple has to fix it.  If 
every single package that gets affected by this OS bug implements its 
own fix, the problem will only become worse with time, instead of 
better.  By my book, the only sensible approach would be to put an "if 
MacOSX version 10.5, change default to --readline=builtin" into our 
configure.in, assuming that Apple gets their act together before 10.6.

Experience tells us that nothing lasts longer than "temporary 
workarounds" like this.  And they often cause bigger troubles than they 
were originally intended to solve.  E.g., the GIF patent has been dead 
and buried for years now, and we're still suffering the consequences of 
our attempts to accomodate it.