BSD libedit

[Thimo N. <th...@de...>]

Hi,

a bit later than I originally planned but here are my results of
checking if NetBSDs libedit can be used as license-compatible
libreadline replacement:

First of all, the capabilities have much improved, now it feels just
like GNU readline and is heavily configurable. It's also used by
Heimdal and asterisk. However, the native interface is quite
different. To use libedit in gnuplot there are two possibilities:

1) use the readline compatibility layer of libedit

2) write an abstraction layer which allows to switch between native
   readline / GNU libreadline / BSD libedit

As the GNU readline-calls are widely spread through the source and I
haven't got enough overview I've tried 1). This worked quite well,
with just a couple of lines changed the compilation works until the
linking where several special libreadline-functions are missing. That
may be a special problem as the libedit2 in Debian unstable is quite
old. I've asked the maintainer to build a newer version (the current
CVS-version seems to contain more readline compatibility) and will
tell you new results when it's ready.

If you, however, think that 2) may be a good idea I would offer my
help. Otherwise, stay tuned for new results in a couple of weeks :)

Cheers
   Thimo