Re: readline history doesn't work on FreeBSD

[Yuri <yuri@rawbw.com>]

On 11/26/18 10:43 AM, Karim Belabas wrote:
> The problem is we need to have a filename and a place on the filesystem
> where it can be written ("~/.gp_history" is arbitrary).
>
> We have no good universal choice here [e.g. "~" doesn't exist on Windows]
> and I personally hate it when programs start to write files all over my
> directories without telling me or (worse) without providing overrides.
>
> Also this file can become quite big over time, depending on the value of
> history-size (which may be set in readline's initialization file).
>
> So we let the user opt in for the feature and provide explicit
> instructions ...


An alternative solution is to make readline history work by default on 
systems where locations are unambiguous.

Linux, BSD, MacOS, even Cygwin have particular user home directories 
where it is customary to write files beginning with a dot like 
~/.gp_history.


Windows doesn't have many things, another example being is software 
packaging system is missing on Windows. This doesn't mean that others 
shouldn't have packaging systems, on the opposite, virtually all of them do.


Letting one bad actor to spoil experience for everybody is kind of silly.


Yuri