Re: [PATCH CVS] Readline improvements

[Bill Allombert <allomber@math.u-bordeaux.fr>]

On Tue, Nov 26, 2002 at 06:41:56PM +0100, Karim BELABAS wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Oct 2002, Ilya Zakharevich wrote:
> >   b) make default(readline,4) and default(readline,2) etc. switch the
> >      electric TAB (as above) and electric-parens settings;
> 
> Hum. The idea was that all readline-specific settings go to .inputrc
> ( possibly enclosed by $if Pari-GP / $endif ), but why not ?

While I agree on technical basis with Karim, I agree with Ilya on a more
"social" basis:

We should try to ship a useful default /etc/gprc, especially in packages
that may get installed by admins that never use PARI/GP themselves.

For the Debian package, I have added a README.Debian file which explain how to
enable blink-matching-paren under GP. But how many users will read this file ?

It is technically difficult for a package to update the system /etc/inputrc
file.[1] It is much easier for them to add readline=2 in the default /etc/gprc file
they ship.

Cheers,
Bill
----
[1] The Debian way to do that, if there were one, would be to add a 
/etc/inputrc.d directory and a script update-inputrc that basically do
cat /etc/inputrc.d/* >/etc/inputrc.  Then every packages that want to add something
to /etc/inputrc just drop a file in /etc/inputrc.d/ and run update-inputrc in
theirs post-installation script.  Once at least a dozen Debian packages use
this mechanism, some Debian developers would probably manage to push that to
another major distro (the one that pay them *cough* at the end of the month).
At this point, we will just need to push that to the Linux Standard Base, and then
in 5 to 7 years, a majority of linux distribution will implement that. Then
it would be the time to push it to Solaris, True64, if they still exist by that
time.

Well I should stop reading debian-devel...