ANNOUNCE: GHC version 6.10.1 - EditLine / terminal incompatibility?

[Duncan Coutts]

On Fri, 2008-11-21 at 11:59 +0100, Philip K.F. Hölzenspies wrote:
> On Friday 21 November 2008 10:49:47 Jules Bean wrote:

> > Something must be very very broken : surely it is not expected behaviour
> > for editline to need configuration in this way?
> 
> One can call it broken, another will say users should settle for the default 
> behaviour. Neither readline, nor editline *need* configuration this way, 
> because they do come with sensible defaults.

But that's just it. It seems that readline does come with sensible
defaults and editline does not. For example xterm is not a rare kind of
terminal (basically every terminal in use claims to be xterm) and yet
delete does not work with it out-of-the-box with editline. That is
broken.

[To add insult to injury, even when I look up the escape sequence for
delete using the cat/telnet trick, I still cannot configure editline to
recognise it.]

> However, some people want custom behaviour and they'll have to figure
> out how stuff works for their machine.

That's a different matter. Most people have never configured anything
custom and just want the common basics to work. In fact most linux users
have never looked at a readline man page and don't know what an escape
sequence is. It has to work right for the users who do not know that it
is possible to configure, otherwise they will call it broken.

Duncan