Re: Debian readline/libedit breakage

On 02/14/2011 02:26 PM, Marko Kreen wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 3:08 PM, Martin Pitt<mpitt(at)debian(dot)org> wrote:
>> thanks Markus for CC'ing me, I'm not on -hackers(at)(dot)
>>
>> Markus Wanner [2011-02-14 13:37 +0100]:
>>> On 02/10/2011 11:34 PM, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>>>> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=607109
>>
>> Note that the recent discussions happened on bug 608442, in particular
>>
>> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=608442#30
>>
>> and the following comments.
>>
>>> Personally, I'm a bit suspicious about that solution (technically as
>>> well as from a licensing perspective), [...]
>>
>> For the record, so am I (see comment 30 in the link above), as it uses
>> the very same ld.so in both cases. However, Andreas Barth pointed out
>> that with LD_PRELOAD it's guaranteed that we do not "import" any code
>> from the libreadline header files, which guarantees that psql doesn't
>> become something that can be considered a "derived work".
>>
>> Technically, this is a bit fragile, of course, as there might be some
>> subtle ABI differences which lead to crashes. However, the preloading
>> workaround already makes the situation so much better than before, so
>> IMHO it's better than the previous status quo.
>>
>> I don't really like this situation, and personally I'd rather move
>> back to libreadline until OpenSSL or readline or PostgreSQL threatens
>> Debian with a legal case for license violation (I daresay that the
>> chances of this happening are very close to zero..). But oh well..
>
> I think it would be better to revert to readline and make note
> that conversion depends on libedit's readiness for unicode.
> I doubt anybody in Debian is that gung-ho to veto current state...
>
> Informing libedit about relevant problem would
> be good too. I don't see any bugs about that in Debian's
> bugtracker, did you send them to upstream?

from what I can see upstream libedit actually has utf8 support for a
while now (as well as some other fixes) but the debian libedit version
(and also the one of other distributions) is way too old for that so
maybe most of the issues would be mood if debian updated to a newer
libedit version...

Stefan