Re: readline history doesn't work on FreeBSD

[Karim Belabas <Karim.Belabas@math.u-bordeaux.fr>]

* Yuri [2018-11-26 18:19]:
> On 11/26/18 4:12 AM, Bill Allombert wrote:
> > If you want to keep the history between gp session, you need to set
> > in your .gprc:
> > 
> > histfile = "~/.gp_history"
[...]
> My question is why doesn't pari default to having the history "on"? After a
> while users would forget that this custom action is needed, and as a result
> most would never use the history feature, and some eventually would ask this
> question again.

The problem is we need to have a filename and a place on the filesystem
where it can be written ("~/.gp_history" is arbitrary).

We have no good universal choice here [e.g. "~" doesn't exist on Windows]
and I personally hate it when programs start to write files all over my
directories without telling me or (worse) without providing overrides.

Also this file can become quite big over time, depending on the value of
history-size (which may be set in readline's initialization file).

So we let the user opt in for the feature and provide explicit
instructions ...

Cheers,

    K.B.

P.S. I just made this into a FAQ

  http://pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/faq.html#readlinehistory
--
Karim Belabas, IMB (UMR 5251)  Tel: (+33) (0)5 40 00 26 17
Universite de Bordeaux         Fax: (+33) (0)5 40 00 21 23
351, cours de la Liberation    http://www.math.u-bordeaux.fr/~kbelabas/
F-33405 Talence (France)       http://pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/  [PARI/GP]
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