Using GNU readline:

The Python interpreter is much nicer to work with interactively if

you've got readline installed. Highly recommended.

You can get the original GNU readline 2.2 source code from your

favourite GNU software repository, such as

ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/.

You can get the only-slightly-modified-for-BeOS version of GNU

readline 2.2 from the GeekGadgets repository;

ftp://ftp.ninemoons.com/pub/geekgadgets/.

Building libreadline for BeOS hosts:

Note that we don't build a shared library version of libreadline and

libhistory. That's left as an exercise for the reader.

You won't be able to link against libreadline.a using the limited

linker.

1) If you're on a PowerPC system, install the POSIX ar from

http://www.qnx.com/~chrish/Be/software/index.html#programming

(note that it's currently packaged with Python, in the BeOS/ar-1.1

directory).

If you're on an x86 system, you can leave out the "AR=ar-posix"

part of the following instructions. In fact, you'll have to...

2) For PowerPC, configure with:

CC=mwcc CFLAGS="-O7 -i- -I." AR=ar-posix RANLIB=: ./configure --verbose \

--without-gcc --prefix=/boot/home/config powerpc-*-beos

For x86, configure with:

CC=mwcc CFLAGS="-O2 -i- -I." RANLIB=: ./configure --verbose \

--without-gcc --prefix=/boot/home/config x86-*-beos

Don't worry about the warnings/errors configure spews for

powerpc-*-beos or x86-*-beos; readline doesn't actually use this host

information for anything, although configure will die if you don't

specify it.

3) Edit config.h to comment out "#define HAVE_SELECT 1"; select() on

BeOS doesn't work on file descriptors (such as stdin).

4) For PowerPC, make with:

make AR=ar-posix

For x86, make with:

make

5) Install with:

make install