Mail Archives: djgpp-workers/1999/06/07/02:23:31
On Sun, 6 Jun 1999, Mark E. wrote:
> I think it would be a good idea to come up one set of
> changes and produce an official DJGPP port of Readline 4.0. Then
> submit the changes to the Bash/Readline maintainer against the
> unmodified 4.0 so we can eventually get the Bash/GDB/etc. versions in
> sync.
I agree. I even had plans to do this as an spinoff of testing
Robert's port of GDB.
But now, having looked at the code, I don't think it's a good idea to
make Readline port happen before we have some additional
infrastructure elsewhere in DJGPP. I'm talking mostly about things
like support for editing keys (arrows, PgUp/PgDn, etc.), transparent
translation of Alt-<key> into Meta-<key>, and the basic termcap
functions like tgetstr and tputs.
Some of these features should probably be part of termios. Termcap
functionality could be lifted from a port of GNU termcap which was
done a long time ago, but I'd like to see that port improved to work,
at least partially, in non-text modes, to allow features like limited
debugging of graphics programs with GDB (which I have in my binary of
GDB right now). Since termios works just fine in standard graphics
modes, this shouldn't be a big problem, probably not much more than
extending functions like ScreenClear and friends to work in graphics
modes.
Without that minimal functionality, any Readline port will never be
clean, especially if we want it to work in graphics modes. Ifdef'ing
away code that doesn't work and ditching functionality that we cannot
easily emulate (like the insert and delete functions disabled by the
ported Readline) is not my idea of a good port.
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