Re: Making tab-complete.c easier to maintain

On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 02:09:43AM +0200, Andres Freund wrote:
> On 2015-10-22 16:26:10 -0700, David Fetter wrote:
> > To be affective negatively by libreadline's viral license, an entity
> > would need to fork the psql client in proprietary ways that they did
> > not wish not to make available to end users, at the same time linking
> > in libreadline.
>
> > Maybe I'm missing something big, but I really don't see people out
> > there shipping a libreadline-enabled psql client, details of whose
> > source they'd want to keep a deep, dark secret.
>
> Isn't that just about every proprietary fork of postgres?

Proprietary versions of the psql client? I'm not sure I understand.

Proprietary, secret changes to the back end, sure, but the client?
The most recent example I recall of that is Netezza, and I suspect
that they just couldn't be bothered to publish the changes they made.
At that time, the community psql client was not by any means as nice
as it is now, so it's conceivable that they made substantive
improvements, at least for talking to Netezza DBs.

> Most have added backend features and I guess many of those have in
> turn added support to psql for those features. Sure it'd probably
> in reality be relatively harmless for them to release these psql
> modifications, but I rather doubt their management will generally
> see it that way.

Is it really on us as a community to go long distances out of our way
to assuage the baseless[1] paranoia of people who are by and large not
part of our community?

As to our "support" of libedit, feel free to try working with a psql
client that has libedit instead of libreadline for a few weeks. It
would be a very long stretch, at least for the work flows I've seen so
far, to call that client functional. The strongest praise I can come
up with is that it's usually not quite as awful as working with a psql
client entirely devoid of command line editing support.

Of course, we can continue to pretend that there is a viable
alternative to libreadline if that soothes down some feathers, but I
don't see any reason to make substantive sacrifices in service of
keeping that particular box checked.

Cheers,
David.

[1] as far as I know, and I'll take this back in its entirety if
someone shows me a reasonable basis
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666 Yahoo!: dfetter
Skype: davidfetter XMPP: david(dot)fetter(at)gmail(dot)com

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