Source: libedit
Severity: wishlist
Tags: patch
Hi,
This is a proposal to introduce one additional development library to
libedit. It is the go-to package to compile readline-enabled software
that cannot use readline since its license change to GPL-3. With
#737301, the last GPL-2 readline version was orphaned and is not
maintained for 4.5 years. Only two packages still depend on it: lvm2 and
xfsprogs.
However, there are a lot of packages which have patches on them to link
with libedit instead of readline. Also, there is software in the archive
that depends on libreadline8 even though their licenses are
incompatible, e.g., see bible-kjv issue #977639.
For both the existing patched software and the license incompatible
software, a development library that provides the libreadline-dev file
names but resolves them to libedit-dev files would reduce (for some
packages even eliminate) the effort that is involved in porting a
package to use libedit over readline.
A patch with such a shim package called libeditreadline-dev is included.
It only contains symbolic links. I tested it with bible-kjv, lvm2, and
xfsprogs. The only change that was needed to build them with libedit
instead of readline was replacing libreadline-dev with
libeditreadline-dev in their Build-Dependencies.
Regards,
Bastian
From: Bastian Germann <bastiangerm...@fishpost.de>
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 2020 13:15:25 +0100
Subject: Add a shim readline development library
With DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH in the .links file, debhelper-compat 13 is needed.
This implies ignoring the libedit.la file.
---
debian/compat | 1 -
debian/control | 18 +++++++++++++++++-
debian/libeditreadline-dev.links | 5 +++++
debian/not-installed | 1 +
4 files changed, 23 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
delete mode 100644 debian/compat
create mode 100644 debian/libeditreadline-dev.links
create mode 100644 debian/not-installed
diff --git a/debian/compat b/debian/compat
deleted file mode 100644
index b4de394..0000000
--- a/debian/compat
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1 +0,0 @@
-11
diff --git a/debian/control b/debian/control
index cdce9cc..ca8232c 100644
--- a/debian/control
+++ b/debian/control
@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ Uploaders:
Sylvestre Ledru <sylves...@debian.org>,
Rules-Requires-Root: no
Build-Depends:
- debhelper (>= 11),
+ debhelper-compat (= 13),
pkg-config,
groff-base,
libbsd-dev (>= 0.1.3),
@@ -50,3 +50,19 @@ Description: BSD editline and history libraries (development files)
history, and tokenization functions.
.
It slightly resembles GNU readline.
+
+Package: libeditreadline-dev
+Section: libdevel
+Architecture: any
+Multi-Arch: same
+Depends:
+ ${misc:Depends},
+ libedit-dev
+Conflicts: libreadline-dev, libreadline5-dev, libreadline-gplv2-dev
+Description: BSD editline and history libraries (shim development files)
+ GNU readline changed its license from GPL-2 to GPL-3 with version 6,
+ which excludes GPL-2-only programs from using current readline versions.
+ editline resembles readline functionally and with regards to its API.
+ .
+ This is a development shim library that can be used to link a GPL-2-only
+ program that depends on readline with editline.
diff --git a/debian/libeditreadline-dev.links b/debian/libeditreadline-dev.links
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ebb9fb7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/debian/libeditreadline-dev.links
@@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
+usr/include/editline usr/include/readline
+usr/lib/${DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH}/libedit.a usr/lib/${DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH}/libhistory.a
+usr/lib/${DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH}/libedit.so usr/lib/${DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH}/libhistory.so
+usr/lib/${DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH}/libedit.a usr/lib/${DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH}/libreadline.a
+usr/lib/${DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH}/libedit.so usr/lib/${DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH}/libreadline.so
diff --git a/debian/not-installed b/debian/not-installed
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1737e93
--- /dev/null
+++ b/debian/not-installed
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+usr/lib/*/libedit.la
