[Bug-readline] Readline-6.0 available for FTP

[Chet Ramey]

The first public release of the GNU Readline library, version 6.0,
is now available for FTP with the URLs

ftp://ftp.cwru.edu/pub/bash/readline-6.0.tar.gz
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/readline/readline-6.0.tar.gz

and from the usual GNU mirror sites.

This distribution is essentially a standalone version of the
readline library that appears in Bash-4.0 together with
an `autoconf' framework.  The documentation has been updated and
is current.  Postscript, DVI, and Info versions of the Readline
and History manuals are included.  A list of changes in this
release is appended to this announcement.

This release accompanies the simultaneous release of bash-4.0.
Several more annoying bugs in the multibyte character redisplay code
have been corrected.  There are improvements in the programming
interface and new user-visible variables bindable commands.

GNU Readline is a library which provides programs with an input
facility including command-line editing and history.  Editing
commands similar to both emacs and vi are included.  The GNU
History library, which provides facilities for managing a list of
previously-typed command lines and an interactive command line
recall facility similar to that provided by csh, is also present.
The history library is built as part of the readline as well as
separately.

Please send readline bug reports to address@hidden

As always, thanks for your help.

Chet

+========== CHANGES ==========+
This document details the changes between this version, readline-6.0,
and the previous version, readline-5.2.

1.  Changes to Readline

a.  Fixed a number of redisplay errors in environments supporting multibyte 
    characters.

b.  Fixed bugs in vi command mode that caused motion commands to inappropriately
    set the mark.

c.  When using the arrow keys in vi insertion mode, readline allows movement
    beyond the current end of the line (unlike command mode).

d.  Fixed bugs that caused readline to loop when the terminal has been taken
    away and reads return -1/EIO.

e.  Fixed bugs in redisplay occurring when displaying prompts containing
    invisible characters.

f.  Fixed a bug that caused the completion append character to not be reset to
    the default after an application-specified completion function changed it.

g.  Fixed a problem that caused incorrect positioning of the cursor while in
    emacs editing mode when moving forward at the end of a line while using
    a locale supporting multibyte characters.

h.  Fixed an off-by-one error that caused readline to drop every 511th
    character of buffered input.

i.  Fixed a bug that resulted in SIGTERM not being caught or cleaned up.

j.  Fixed redisplay bugs caused by multiline prompts with invisible characters
    or no characters following the final newline.

k.  Fixed redisplay bug caused by prompts consisting solely of invisible
    characters.

l.  Fixed a bug in the code that buffers characters received very quickly in
    succession which caused characters to be dropped.

m.  Fixed a bug that caused readline to reference uninitialized data structures
    if it received a SIGWINCH before completing initialzation.

n.  Fixed a bug that caused the vi-mode `last command' to be set incorrectly
    and therefore unrepeatable.

o.  Fixed a bug that caused readline to disable echoing when it was being used
    with an output file descriptor that was not a terminal.

p.  Readline now blocks SIGINT while manipulating internal data structures
    during redisplay.

q.  Fixed a bug in redisplay that caused readline to segfault when pasting a
    very long line (over 130,000 characters).

r.  Fixed bugs in redisplay when using prompts with no visible printing
    characters.

s.  Fixed a bug that caused redisplay errors when using prompts with invisible
    characters and numeric arguments to a command in a multibyte locale.

t.  Fixed a bug that caused redisplay errors when using prompts with invisible
    characters spanning more than two physical screen lines.

2.  New Features in Readline

a.  A new variable, rl_sort_completion_matches; allows applications to inhibit
    match list sorting (but beware: some things don't work right if
    applications do this).

b.  A new variable, rl_completion_invoking_key; allows applications to discover
    the key that invoked rl_complete or rl_menu_complete.

c.  The functions rl_block_sigint and rl_release_sigint are now public and
    available to calling applications who want to protect critical sections
    (like redisplay).

d.  The functions rl_save_state and rl_restore_state are now public and
    available to calling applications; documented rest of readline's state
    flag values.

e.  A new user-settable variable, `history-size', allows setting the maximum
    number of entries in the history list.

f.  There is a new implementation of menu completion, with several improvements
    over the old; the most notable improvement is a better `completions
    browsing' mode.

g.  The menu completion code now uses the rl_menu_completion_entry_function
    variable, allowing applications to provide their own menu completion
    generators.

h.  There is support for replacing a prefix  of a pathname with a `...' when
    displaying possible completions.  This is controllable by setting the
    `completion-prefix-display-length' variable.  Matches with a common prefix
    longer than this value have the common prefix replaced with `...'.

i.  There is a new `revert-all-at-newline' variable.  If enabled, readline will
    undo all outstanding changes to all history lines when `accept-line' is
    executed.


-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer

Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    address@hidden    http://tiswww.tis.case.edu/~chet/