readline support in socat is disabled for good licensing reasons (see
#632481), but line editing support is practical (and advertised in the
man page).

it seems that the editline library (or possibly the unpackaged linenoise
library) could provide a drop-in replacement for most of api and
functionality. the netkit-ftp-ssl package uses a moderate patch to
achieve that[1], something similar could be possible for socat as well.
my own attempts at that failed already at building the unmodified socat,
which i can't track down any further right now.

this wishlist item is something that could well go to the upstream
wishlist as well, but it is my impression that it's primarily debian and
similarly strict distributions where the issue itches.


thanks for providing the socat package
chrysn

[1] https://sources.debian.net/patches/netkit-ftp-ssl/0.17.33%2B0.2-2/640_use_editline.diff/

No that I look at since this somehow poped-up in the recent update by
some reason: Could we actually enable readline-support back?

Looking at socat, it is granting an exception to OpenSSL if it matches
the license in COPYING.OpenSSL according d/copyright. Now, this is not
the case anymore as OpenSSL is licensed under Apache-2.0. So the license
exception isn't be valid. But then COPYING says "either version 2 of
the License, or (at your option) any later version." and this reads as
GPLv2+ which is compatible with Apache-2.0. Since readline is GPLv2+ as
well, this would allow to enable readline support.

Sebastian