readline problems

[Clark McGrew <mcgrew@ale.physics.sunysb.edu>]

Hello,

It's likely that I'm missing something, but it's turning out to be
tricky to add readline support back into a guile program.  It's not
just a matter of calling scm_init_readline.  The problem is that
boot-9 defines the top-repl before any user init functions are called
and it checks to see if readline is available.

This leads me to some problems I've had to fight with guile's
initialization:

    -- User initialization functions can only be called after boot-9
       has been loaded.  This makes it impossible to initialize a
       readline feature from a user library without also overriding
       boot-9's (top-repl).  I get around it by copying the relavent
       sections of boot-9.scm to my-boot-9.scm and loading it in
       my_init_readline, but it seems clumsy.

    -- Using guile's exported interface it's not possible for an
       application to substitute it's own init scripts in place of or
       in addition to .guile.  I manage to force a boot script after
       boot-9 by munging argv, but that's an iffy solution.

Hopefully I'm doing something wrong and there are easier solutions.

Cheers,

Clark