Re: Interested in porting Dash to Readline

[Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Chet Ramey wrote in
 <d3076b26-3794-8a34-1d96-4c2156d83b42@xxxxxxxx>:
 |On 6/10/23 1:49 PM, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
 |> S M wrote in
 |>   <DS7PR19MB445653200E02F41EB31397C5E351A@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx\
 |>   l\
 |>   ook.com>:
 |>|On Fri, Jun 09, 2023 at 11:29:15PM +0200, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
 |>|> Quoting Dalai Lama (50 years in India jubilee) "it is all there".
 |>|> FreeBSD bin/sh/histedit.c:sh_matches() as well as :sh_complete()
 |>|> (all BSD licensed).
 |>|
 |>|So is it a licensing concern? I still think Readline is more
 |> 
 |> I do not think BSD-3-clause disallows bundling within GPL.
 |> But i am a total licensing idiot.
 |
 |Readline is licensed using GPL3. You may wish to check whether or not that
 |is compatible with dash's BSD licensing. That's something the dash folks
 |have to decide for themselves.

Ah dash is BSD.  I wrote some (dangling) patches for busybash ash
which is -- i still think -- rooted on dash and is GPLv2 (on top
of "original BSD copyright notice is retained at the end of this
file").

 |>|featureful as I have worked with both. I did poke around NetBSD's
 |> 
 |> It surely is.  (Much more so, but also fat.)
 |> 
 |>|ash code and remember that it used an internal Libedit header
 |>|"filecomplete.h" or something along those lines to implement
 |>|filename completion. Not that porting or re-implementing such
 |>|internal routines would be particularly hard. If I recall correctly
 |>|there is a publicfunction in libedit named "_el_fn_complete"
 |>|that implements something along those lines.
 |>|
 |>|If it's a licensing problem then there's no way around it, though
 |>|I thought that GPL restrictions of this kind would only apply to
 |>|redistributed binaries linked against readline and not to the
 |>|source code itself.
 |> 
 |> Well it _could_ be possible to compile dash with any editing and
 |> simply use "rlwrap"[1] (cudo Stephen Isard) to hook readline into
 |> dash.  Then your effort has already ended.
 |
 |If you use rlwrap, you don't have the insight into the internal state of
 |the application that allows you to do completion on anything more than
 |what readline understands natively (filenames, mostly).

For me personally that is enough -- context-sensitive completion
is a cool thing though.
The way readline does that filename completion is still luxury,
i "designed" the expansion of my mailer with it in mind (surely
rude codewise shall it be compared, and with
line-editor-cpl-word-breaks=:"'@=;|, instead of readline's
rl_basic_word_break_characters=\t\n"\'`@$><=;|&{().

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)
|~~
|..and in spring, hear David Leonard sing..
|
|The black bear,          The black bear,
|blithely holds his own   holds himself at leisure
|beating it, up and down  tossing over his ups and downs with pleasure
|~~
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