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

[Fergus Henderson]

On 25-Mar-1999, Tyson Dowd <trd at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> 
> I suspect GNU do it for historical reasons.  Once upon a time nobody had
> readline so you had to include it. 

I suspect another reason they do it may be that they have packages
that depend on a larger number of other packages than we do.
It's one thing for us to say you need three packages (gcc, GNU make,
and readline); it's another thing to ask the user to install say
a dozen other packages.

> > Anyway, how about if I do the following for now:
> > - add the hooks to install readline if it is present in the Mercury 
> >   distribution but not found on the system that we're install on;
> > - but don't actually include readline in the distribution?
> > 
> > The hooks are pretty small.
> 
> I'm happy with that, but I'd like you to reconsider installing readline
> in $prefix/

I think I will leave this alone for the moment, just because it's
a little tricky to implement -- probably not that tricky, but we
can deal with that if/when we include readline in the 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.