Re: php interactive shell without readline

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/