[racket-dev] Line editing in the default REPL

On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 11:00 AM, Matthew Flatt <mflatt at cs.utah.edu> wrote:
> Do you have in mind making "xrepl" intended to be part of Minimal
> Racket? If not, what's the mechanism for `racket` using "xrepl" when
> it's available?

I can think of a few ways of doing this.

 1 Just make xrepl part of minimal Racket (probably removing the
mandatory dependency on scribble/text/wrap)
 2 Have `racket/init` dynamically test of the presence of
"xrepl/main.rkt" as a collection-file-path, and load it if available.
 3 Have `racket/init` (or the `racket` binary) test for something like
`racket/init/extended` which would be part of "xrepl" and part of
other extended repls.
 4 Like 3, but have an additional package which depends on "xrepl" and
just contains `racket/init/extended`

I prefer 2, 3, or 4 of these options -- it seems fine for "Minimal
Racket" to not have line editing, but I'd be interested to hear what
others expect.

> A similar question applies to "libeditline". Currently, for Linux and
> other Unix platforms (not counting "natipkg" variants), our convention
> is that native libraries are either part of the `[g]racket` executable
> or they are installed separately by users through the OS's package
> manager. We can't link to "libreadline" by default in a Racket
> distribution, and since "libeditline" isn't typically included with
> Linux distributions (as far as I can tell), it seems like we haven't
> solved any problem unless we provide "libeditline". Should
> "libeditline" become not only part of the Minimal Racket distribution,
> but even part of the Racket executable? Or should our convention and/or
> distribution infrastructure change?

I was thinking that the "readline-core" package would dynamically test
of "libeditline", and if it's not there fall back to "libreadline". My
opinion, as someone who isn't a lawyer but has read a lot about this,
is that this would not cause Racket to be a derived work of readline.

If we don't want to do that, I see a few possibilities:

 1. We ship xrepl in whichever way we decide, and change the message
it prints when it can't find "libeditline" to suggest changing things
or adding (require xrepl/readline) to .racketrc.
 2. We ship a copy of "libeditline"with xrepl as a built binary, even on linux.
 3. We statically link "libeditline" to Racket in the standard distribution.

I think 1 sounds most appealing if we're not ok with dynamically
falling back to "libreadline".

Sam

>
> At Mon, 24 Nov 2014 18:02:45 -0500, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt wrote:
>> My understanding of the licensing issues is that if the code works with
>> both "libeditline" and "libreadline" then it isn't a derived work of
>> readline, and therefore could be licensed under the LGPL, like the rest of
>> Racket. Furthermore, turning use of "libeditline" on by default wouldn't be
>> linking to any GPL code, meaning that we could do that by default.
>>
>> I think we should split up the `readline` collection into `readline` and
>> `readline/base` which would be what's compatible with editline, and have
>> xrepl in a `readline/base` mode on by default.
>>
>> Sam
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 5:57 PM, Leif Andersen <leif at leifandersen.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > Hello,
>> >
>> > When a user first starts the racket repl, it doesn't do line editing due
>> > to licensing issues. For example, it would be nice if the default editor
>> > would give the previous line if you hit up arrow, rather than writing
>> > "^[[A".
>> >
>> > I have now pointed out xrepl to several users, and every time they always
>> > ask me why it's not the default repl. Apparently the problem is that xrepl
>> > uses GNU Readline, which is GPL. However, Asumu found that if we replace
>> > requiring readline with BSD's libedit (not libeditline), everything works
>> > fine due to libedit's readline compatibility. It doesn't have all of the
>> > features of readline, but it does have some of the biggest ones (such as
>> > being able to use arrow keys)
>> >
>> > What do you all think of having `(require editline)` that works for the
>> > default repl, so that it gets line editing features. This would allow us to
>> > also keep `(require readline)` as before, maintaining backwards
>> > compatibility.
>> >
>> > If we do do this, this leads to the question of distribution. Would we
>> > want to include libedit inside Racket distributions, or should we just link
>> > to whatever the user has on their system?
>> >
>> > ~Leif Andersen
>> >
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>> >
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