PostgreSQL, OpenSSL, and the GPL

Posted Feb 16, 2011 20:41 UTC (Wed) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841)
In reply to: PostgreSQL, OpenSSL, and the GPL by dberkholz
Parent article: PostgreSQL, OpenSSL, and the GPL

Am I understanding correctly that this whole discussion is because nobody's fixing a bug in libedit?

Calling it a "bug" isn't really correct. libedit simply doesn't have any support for UTF-8. Or wait - you could say it's a bug in the documentation; the source distribution site www.thrysoee.dk/editline/ does mention UTF-8 support, but having gone over the source code I conclude that whoever wrote that did not understand the difference between support for "wchar" fixed-length 16 bit or 32 bit encodings and support for a variable length encoding like UTF-8. libedit recently added support for the former, but I found no hint of support for the latter.

The gnuplot project has been suffering from this problem for a long time now. It would be nice to offer the option of linking to libedit (in fact we do offer that option) but it simply doesn't work in a UTF-8 or SJIS environment. This is particularly annoying because Apple ships a version of libedit with OSX that announces itself as "readline". But it isn't, so programs that autoconfigure to use readline then fail because "readline" is really "libedit".

Now I would be happy as a clam if someone can tell me otherwise, and point to source for a libedit version, buggy or not, that does really support UTF-8. Anyone?