[Melbourne-pm] Ahhh... so close

[Robert Norris]

Hi Scott,

> But where did it fall down - IO::Prompt !!!

I guess thats my cue to come out of the wordwork. A couple of years ago
I wrote a patch[1] to add completion and history support to IO::Prompt.
I spoke to Damian about it later and he had a pile of comments about it.

I volunteered to take on maintenance of the module. Shortly after that I
got sidetracked and didn't touch it again until I saw your email this
morning.

Amongst other things, I'm sitting on a patch from a Thomas Glaesser to
make IO::Prompt work on Win32. Its in pretty poor shape though. It has a
pile of control code handling and such that really belongs in
Term::ReadKey.

The first thing I've been trying to do is get a test suite in place,
which is kinda hard as the whole thing is terminal-centric. I've been
writing a module, Test::MockTerm, that fakes a terminal, but its a real
mess at the moment. I should have it into some sort of shape in the next
few days.

Once the test suite is there, work can begin on new features. I want to
shift all the knowledge of how to open, read from and write to the
console on different platforms out to another module. I'm not sure if
thats Term::ReadKey or a whole new package. Once it exists IO::Prompt
can be modified to use it and then Win32 support can happen.

Anyway I'm getting the code into my git repositories[2]. Again, its all
a bit all over the place but it shouldn't take long to get it into some
kind of shape. All help gratefully received :)

Cheers,
Rob.

[1] http://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=21055
[2] http://cataclysm.cx/git/