Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:62055
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: pass (pb1.pair.com: domain ajf.me designates 64.22.89.134 as permitted sender)
Message-ID: <501F0047.9080005@ajf.me>
Date: Mon, 06 Aug 2012 00:22:47 +0100
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:14.0) Gecko/20120714 Thunderbird/14.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Ferenc Kovacs <tyra3l@gmail.com>
CC: =?UTF-8?B?Sm9oYW5uZXMgU2NobMO8dGVy?= <johannes@schlueters.de>, 
 PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
References: <CAH-PCH7QP-XxS3=+if7yoVNmCfiM4+HOhwOCDzSVJNsFEMCWRg@mail.gmail.com> <1344205126.1440.1086.camel@guybrush> <CAH-PCH5FmkjT+x7FpRo9C-_56reqo-m+ays3nN4b9Whpyz4AMQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAH-PCH5FmkjT+x7FpRo9C-_56reqo-m+ays3nN4b9Whpyz4AMQ@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] php interactive shell without readline
From: ajf@ajf.me (Andrew Faulds)

On 06/08/12 00:21, Ferenc Kovacs wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 12:18 AM, Johannes Schlüter
> <johannes@schlueters.de>wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 2012-08-04 at 21:49 +0200, Ferenc Kovacs wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> As most of you know, the current php interactive shell is pretty much
>>> useless without compiling php --with-readline, but for the most users
>> this
>>> the first impression what they experience (eg. using the php interactive
>>> shell without readline support).
>> Note that for 5.4 I refactored the code so a shared readline extension
>> is good enough by moving all shell related parts to ext/readline. This
>> should reduce the pain for distribution package users where typically
>> everything is shared.
>>
> for the record that would be https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=53878 and
> http://git.php.net/?p=php-src.git;a=commit;h=6c734a6b4c9ecf90162cf53fcf5f89864ccabbde
>   right?
>
>>> There is an alternative readline replacement called linenoise (
>>> https://github.com/antirez/linenoise/) written by the author of Redis,
>> and
>>> I would like to know, what do you think about using that for the
>>> interactive shell if php is built without readline support.
>>> It is really small/compact and it is under the two clause BSD license so
>> I
>>> think it would be a good candidate for bundling it in php.
>>> What do you think about it? Is it something worth looking into?
>> There are two ways to do that: Either move the shell code back to
>> sapi/cli or making ext/readline play nice with linenoise.
>>
> I have to grasp the code a little bit better to answer that, but from a
> quick look I think that it was an improvement, that the readline stuff was
> moved out from there, so I think that we should keep that.
> The linenoise would be always available and I think it would be only a
> couple of lines, so I think that it would be possible to put it into
> php_cli.c but as you mentioned we should make it such a way, that even the
> dynamically loaded readline has to be able to override it.
>
>
>> When using the first approach make sure that the user can still pick
>> readline, as readline has features linenoise (currently) hasn't, like
>> searching using Ctrl+r or configuration of the key combinations.
>
> agree, linenoise can't replace readline, so in general I think that we
> should only use it, if readline isn't available.
>
>
>> I'd
>> also like if readline can be built shared but still overwrite the
>> built-in default.
>>
> agree
>
>
>> Doing the second approach has the benefit that the lib can be exported
>> to userland in the same run. While then there's little benefit as it all
>> still depends on an extension ...
>>
>> (Actually there would be a third possibility - writing a linenoise
>> extension which uses sapi/cli's hook but that requires duplicating most
>> of the shell code and makes things more complicated, let#s ignore
>> this ;-) )
>>
>> What's your plan there?
>>
>>
> to tell you the truth I'm just throwing around ideas and waiting for
> somebody with better understanding the actual implementation to help me
> out. ;)
>
Well if linenoise() isn't that different, you could use #ifdefs to make 
it use the correct lib at compile-time, no?

-- 
Andrew Faulds
http://ajf.me/