Bug#977664: libedit: Add a shim readline development library

[Bastian Germann]

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
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