Re: Why does bash bundles readline instead of use a shared one?

[Chet Ramey]

On 5/28/18 12:27 PM, Garreau, Alexandre wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Today, searching in my distribution (debian) for which packages depended
> on readline, I learnt that bash didn’t link with readline, but bundled
> its own version present in its sources tree.

1. Bash has always had readline, even before there was a separate readline
   distribution. There's no compelling reason to change this.

2. They are developed and released at the same time by the same person. The
   current version of readline is always the same as the one in the current
   version of bash with a build framework added.

3. Bash ships with as few external dependencies as possible. Many systems
   do not ship a separate readline, and do not ship it as part of the base
   system.

4. Bash generally takes advantage of the features available in the newest
   (concurrent) version of readline; there is no reason to add the burden
   of fetching and building readline along with bash.

If you want to build bash and link it against a separately-built readline,
as long as that version is current enough, there is a configure option to
do it.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/