Re: [Jscheme-user] Patch: GNU readline editing/history in REPL

[Greg T. <gd...@ir...>]

The issue in guile is that guile had the 'guile license', which was

  GPL, but with a special exemption linking libguile with something
  does not cause that something to be restricted to the GPL.

GNU readline was straight GPL, so linking guile, readline into foo
meant that the resulting derived work could be distributed at most
under the GPL -- or not at all, if foo's license was not
GPL-compatible.

guile created a loadable binary module that linked in readline to
programs that used libguile.  One did this by running scheme code - I
have this in my .guile:

(use-modules (ice-9 readline))
(define (ar)
  (activate-readline)
  )

In this way, readline becomes available in programs I run that use
guile, but not in the installed version.  Since the resulting
dynamically linked binary is not distributed, there are no issues.

IANAL, TINLA, blah blah blah.

Also, I have heard of a tcsh-like readline library that Sun uses, and
I think it might be called tecla.

I would be inclined to have generic readline-like hooks, and be able
to dynlink in a library that uses readline, following the guile
example.