[Pythonmac-SIG] readline: where and how installed?

[Ronald Oussoren]

On Thursday, April 13, 2006, at 11:53PM, Zachary Pincus <zpincus at stanford.edu> wrote:

>>> So... I have found that IPython exposes a bug in GNU readline 5.1,  
>>> sadly enough. This bug causes segfaults when the up-arrow key is  
>>> used under certain situations. Ugh. Fortunately, the extant  
>>> readline 5.1 patches solve this issue nicely. Hopefully you'll get  
>>> a chance in the near future to update the Universal MacPython  
>>> 2.4.3 distribution so that it doesn't have this issue.
>>
>> Which patch? Please provide a link to that patch, I won't go  
>> hunting for it.
>
>I don't really like how they do it, but on the readline page ( http:// 
>tiswww.tis.case.edu/~chet/readline/rltop.html ) they give you a link  
>to download the latest version of readline ( ftp://ftp.cwru.edu/pub/ 
>bash/readline-5.1.tar.gz ) as well as the link to the patch directory  
>( ftp://ftp.cwru.edu/pub/bash/readline-5.1-patches ). I don't know  
>why they don't spin out x.x.1 point releases to fix known bugs, but  
>they don't, and instead provide the fixes as patches. So any readline  
>build must include the current sources and any patches for that  
>version to be considered bug-free. What a pain.

You can say that. The bad part of this scheme is that they don't say
this. I saw this directory when I downloaded readline, but assumed that
these were patches that may or may not end up in a future version of
readline.

>
>>> Also, a related query: Is there somewhere in the Python Framework  
>>> structure that is appropriate for placing dynamic libraries that  
>>> Python would link to? Judicious use of the install_name_tool and  
>>> friends could produce a libreadline.dylib that the python binary  
>>> would expect at a particular relative path from itself. This would  
>>> allow that library to be dynamically linked, yet still live within  
>>> (and be distributed with) the framework. Just a thought -- but it  
>>> might be more work than it's worth.
>>
>> I don't see what this would buy us. It is possible to do this, but  
>> IMHO not really worth the trouble.
>
>It doesn't buy much really, except obviating the need to re-link  
>python every time a library needs to be changed. So in this case,  
>Michael could have built a fixed readline, put it in the right place,  
>and gone on his merry way with the MacPython distribution. Instead he  
>had to rebuild python himself, from scratch. It's not a big deal  
>though either way. I was just mentioning the possibility, but not  
>really advocating for it.

He could have done this even now, readline is a python extension and
it is not very hard to build an installer for just readline. 

Ronald

>
>Zach
>
>