Re: Bash/readline coupling

Chet Ramey <[email protected]> Fri, 12 Jun 2026 12:10:11 -0400

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.shells.bash.bugs
Organization	ITS, Case Western Reserve University
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On 6/11/26 4:57 PM, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2026-06-11T16:43:22-0400, Chet Ramey wrote:
>> \1 and \2 are documented by readline as the way for applications to
>> signal which characters in the prompt string are and are not visible
>> for redisplay. Readline is used by dozens of other applications, some
>> of which support their own mechanisms for using them. They are not
>> bash-specific.
> 
> I think this fact would be significantly more obvious if readline and
> Bash releases were not coupled. 

Maybe. It's more convenient for me to do the release engineering at the
same time. The two packages do have independent devel and other git
branches, but the version bundled with bash is always the same as the
version released as a standalone package.

> For as long as they are, the impression
> that readline updates only where and when Bash needs it to is going to
> be difficult to overcome.

I suppose. It's not true, since other packages (gdb, python, etc.) drive
readline changes, but the impression is there.

Chet

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

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