Ubuntu
readline6 package

Apparently "Readline6" is not in Ubuntu 18.4.1 LTS but I need it

Bug #1805040 reported by John Janowiak on 2018-11-25

This bug affects 3 people

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	readline6 (Ubuntu)	Confirmed	Undecided	Unassigned

Bug Description

I use applications that require Readline6. But Ubuntu 18.4.1 does not seem to have it - how can Iget it?

Revision history for this message

Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd) wrote on 2018-11-26:

Thanks for reporting.

Looks like readline6 was removed intentionally, see https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/readline6/+publishinghistory or https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=877240 for details.

Ideally the applications should be ported to readline7, which is currently supported and available in Ubuntu 18.04. If that isn't possible, you may be able to manually install the older readline6 packages from an older Ubuntu release. Beware that this might conflict with the newer readline version and may cause problems for other packages which now expect readline7.

(I wasn't sure whether this should be converted to a question, so I left it as a bug report)

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Shankar Unni (shankarunni) wrote on 2019-02-01:

This can't be a good answer.

For external software providers, if they want to ship a program linked against libreadline, and support it on multiple LTS versions of Ubuntu (from 14.04 to 18.04), this makes it impossible for them.

There's no way they can force a link against libreadline5, unless you provide a libreadline5-dev (which you don't, on nay of those versions - the only libreadline-dev will link against libreadline6 on 14.04 and 16.04, and against libreadline7 on 18.04.

So there's no way to link a single executable against libreadline-dev and have it run on all of 14.04, 16.04 and 18.04.

You really _must_ ship a libreadline6 in addition to libreadline5.

Revision history for this message

torel (torehl) wrote on 2019-05-01:

Seeing the same issue on 18.04.2LTS Aarch64. How can I get arround it? Commercial software.

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote on 2019-09-18:

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Changed in readline6 (Ubuntu):
status:	New → Confirmed

Revision history for this message

Shankar Unni (shankarunni) wrote on 2019-09-18:

Why is this still in an "undecided" stage? Anyone who links against libreadline on Ubuntu 14 or 16, and tries to ship a package that can also run on 18, is screwed here.

Another user who ran into this, for example, is here: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/Ubuntu1804ReadlineMess