Re: Emacs AngeFTP fails on macOS 10.14 with GNU inetutils FTP

[Simon Josefsson]

Alex Bochannek <alex@bochannek.com> writes:

> Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org> writes:
>
>>> Is this a known problem? Does this maybe work as intended?
>>
>> Hi.  Thanks for the report.  It is not a known problem.  The output
>> looks weird, and it could be readline or related to buffering.  Could
>> you debug this further to see if you find out why it happens?  Maybe
>> Netkit-ftp/tnftp disables stdin buffering or something else, and
>> InetUtils doesn't.  Just an idea.
>
> It looks like this is the issue on (at least) macOS:
>
> /usr/lib/libreadline.dylib -> libedit.3.dylib
>
> Once I compiled inetutils against a proper Readline, it worked. Is that
> something autoconf could pick up? Or is --with-libreadline-prefix the
> preferred way to resolve this?

Thanks for debugging!

What is /usr/lib/libreadline.dylib on MacOS?  I suppose it does provide
'readline' function or linking would have failed.  Is the tool usable on
the command-line?  If you just start 'ftp' manually and type some
commands, try simple editing of the command, and arrow-up etc.

Probably gnulib's m4/readline.m4 should detect that this particular
libreadline is not usable, but I wonder exactly what is wrong with it
(and how to detect that).  Maybe it is possible to make it work (the
problem still seems related to stdin/stdout buffering somehow -- but
that is just a guess).

/Simon

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