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Reply-To: Levi Morrison <levi.morrison@datadoghq.com>
Date: Wed, 12 May 2021 10:21:19 -0600
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To: David Gebler <davidgebler@gmail.com>
Cc: Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@gmail.com>, PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Disable interactive mode (-a) if readline not available
From: internals@lists.php.net ("Levi Morrison via internals")

On Wed, May 12, 2021 at 10:13 AM David Gebler <davidgebler@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 12 May 2021, 09:13 Nikita Popov, <nikita.ppv@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > I think we would be better off disabling -a completely if readline is not
> > available, and exit with a helpful error message. I've opened
> > https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/6976 to that effect. Does that sound
> > reasonable?
> >
> > Regards,
> > Nikita
> >
>
> +1 for this, the shell is very useful but "interactive mode", the evidence
> is clear has a tendency to confuse people.
> To invert the question, would anyone have a good justification to NOT
> remove interactive mode?

I've never once ran `php -a` and wanted the behavior that comes if you
don't have readline or libedit available. As has been mentioned, if
you want that behavior run `php` without -a. There's no loss of
functionality here, methinks. As long as `php -a` gives a sensible
message if it wasn't built with readline or libedit that says such:

    The interactive shell requires libedit or readline support, which
this build does not have.
    Run php without -a to get an interactive mode instead.

Or something.