update 18.04 to readline8

[Neil Horman]

libreadline up until version 8 didn't include a pkg-config file, and so any other package that relied on being able to find the readline libraries using the autoconf PKG_CHECK_MODULES macro failed in build. This has since been corrected, but I've received several reports of people trying to build dropwatch (https://github.com/nhorman/dropwatch) on 18.04 LTS, which needs readline, and as such fails. libreadline8 has been available in 20.04 for some time, and it would be nice to have it available in the older LTS releases

[Neil Horman (nhorman)]

sooo...Is anyone going to bother looking into this?

[Philip Rego (philrego)]

This is effecting me as well. https://github.com/nhorman/dropwatch/issues/58

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Chris Sommers (chrispsommers)]

Affecting me too on Ubuntu 19.04 also. Also causing GitHub "issues" being (incorrectly) filed on other upstream projects and distracting the maintainer.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

It seems a low priority issue but would be nice to fix, note that it should be possible to install the .pc in the 7.0 version which might be more compliant with SRU rules than a version update

[Neil Horman (nhorman)]

Sure, updating the 7.0 version to include the .pc file for readline is a fine approach to fixing this problem, but I dont think I would consider this a low priority issue. There are 37 non-ubuntu service accounts watching this bug, so it seems to have significant impact. Add to that the fact that, without this update, any package being developed that use readline won't be able to compile with automake on the 18.04 ubuntu release. It should be an easy and very safe (to use the SRU term) to fix this.