On 2019-09-29 22:55, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
The configure code currently has this: # readline on MinGW has problems with backslashes in psql and other bugs. # This is particularly a problem with non-US code pages. # Therefore disable its use until we understand the cause. 2004-07-20 if test "$PORTNAME" = "win32"; then if test "$with_readline" = yes; then AC_MSG_WARN([*** Readline does not work on MinGW --- disabling]) with_readline=no fi fi 2004 is a very long time ago. Has anyone looked at this more recently? It would certainly be nice to have readline-enabled psql on Windows if possible.
I tried this out. First, it doesn't build, because readline doesn't do the dllimport/dllexport dance on global variables, so all references to rl_* global variables in tab-complete.c fail (similar to [0]). After patching those out, it builds, but it doesn't work. It doesn't print a prompt, keys don't do anything sensible. I can enter SQL commands and get results back, but the readline part doesn't do anything sensible AFAICT.
Perhaps I did something wrong. You can still use readline without global variables, but it seems like a serious restriction and makes me wonder whether this has actually ever been used before. It's curious that MSYS2 ships a readline build for mingw. Is there other software that uses it on Windows?
[0]: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/001101c3eb6a$3b275500$f800a...@kuczek.pl
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