Re: [Bash-announce] Readline-8.1-alpha available for download

[Chet Ramey]

On 6/17/20 12:19 PM, Alexandre François Garreau wrote:
> Le mercredi 17 juin 2020, 16:50:28 CEST Chet Ramey a écrit :
>> This distribution is essentially a standalone version of the
>> readline library that appears in bash-5.1-alpha together with
>> an `autoconf' framework.  The documentation has been updated and
>> is current.
> 
> Only the bash one or the readline one too? I didn’t find any mention of 
> “faces” in 9.1 version of readline doc (I found nothing searching for 
> “faces”, “\<face\>”, “highlight”, and nothing new with “paste” and 
> “bracketed”).

It's the same distribution from the same code base. The paragraph you
quoted says exactly that.

>> The most visible new feature is the addition of `faces',
> 
> FaceS, with an S? does that involve either bold or color or background (or 
> other terminal capabilities)? could that be used, or ease, the adding of 
> program-specific syntax coloring and highlighting?

It involves highlighting the region, using the terminal's `standout'
capability. There are functions to denote the region as `active' and
`inactive', and an active region gets displayed using standout mode.
There's only one point and one mark, so you could use this to highlight
a single unit of text, like the text of a compound command.

> Is there anything about such other shells’ and libraries’ features that 
> makes them uninteresting for readline?

Define `uninteresting'. At some point, people have to request features
and someone needs to write the code to implement them.


>> Bracketed paste mode is
>> supported in more places (e.g., in vi `overstrike' mode) and is
>> currently enabled by default.
> 
> The manual in the 8.1-alpha tarballs says the opposite about the default.

I didn't change it yet. I want to see how it's received. If it goes
well during testing, I'll remove the `currently' and change the manual's
default.

>> The first alpha release of the GNU Readline library, version 8.1,
>> is now available for FTP with the URL
>>
>> ftp://ftp.cwru.edu/pub/bash/readline-8.1-alpha.tar.gz
> 
> Isn’t it a privacy problem that this point to amazon hosting?

No.

> 
> It didn’t worked for me (maybe because of my bad internet connection), but 
> I noted it was on GNU ftp, why not mentioning it too?

It's not in the template that I use for release announcements. I suppose
I could add it.

> 
>> and from the readline-8.1-testing branch in the readline git repository
>> (http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/readline.git/log/?h=readline-8.1-testi
>> ng).
> 
> Following that, it seems to me that the direct link from savannah is 
> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/readline.git/snapshot/readline-8.1-alpha.tar.gz,
>  why pointing to /log/?

That URL takes you stright to the commits. If you just want to download the
tar file, your URL works.


-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/