I was delighted to find that Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” includes the readline library. So I was able to just compile PostgreSQL and have psql just work. Only it kinda doesn’t. For reasons that Tom Lane has explained, Tiger’s readline implementation is somewhat buggy. I’ve reported the issue to Apple (Radar # 4356545), but in the meantime, I’ve compiled and installed GNU readline 5.0 and wan to use it, instead.

The only problem is that there is no easy way to do it with environment variables or options when configuring PostgreSQL. I’ve tried:

./configure --includes=/usr/local/include -with-libs=/usr/local/lib

And:

CFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib LDFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include; ./configure

Neither approach worked. In both cases, it still compiled in Apple’s buggy readline library. The only approach I’ve found to work is the brute force approach:

mv /usr/lib/libreadline.* /tmp
mv /usr/include/readline /tmp
./configure
make
make install
mv /tmp/libreadline.* /usr/lib
mv /tmp/readline /usr/include

But surely I’m missing something! Is there no better way to do it?

Looking for the comments? Try the old layout.