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

[Sylvestre Ledru]

Hello,

Le 18/12/2020 à 13:56, Bastian Germann a écrit :
> 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,
Sounds great.

Do you want this for bullseye?

Also, could you please update the patch to include the description of the change in the changelog?

Thanks
S