[m-dev.] for review: add readline support to mdb

[Fergus Henderson]

On 22-Mar-1999, Tyson Dowd <trd at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> On 22-Mar-1999, Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> > Estimated hours taken: 10
> > 
> > Add GNU readline support to the debugger.
> 
> Just one question first -- why include readline in the source distribution?

Well, the idea is to make it easier for the user to install things,
since they only need to install one package, rather than having to install
two. 

It does increase the size of the source distribution a bit
(by about 600k compressed), but that seems like a worthwhile
price to pay for ease of installation, I think... no?

> Readline is not exactly uncommon, I would expect it to be installed
> already on any system that has built their own gdb or bash for instance.
> 
> I don't really like the idea of installing readline as part of the
> installation of Mercury -- if you install with prefix of /usr or
> /usr/local you might overwrite your current installation of readline.

Yes, this is a potential problem.
What do gdb and bash do about this?

How about having the Mercury configure script check if readline is
already installed and only install readline if it hasn't already been
installed?  Or perhaps only if the version of readline installed
is older than the one with the Mercury distribution?

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.