In PR it you refer to -ledit and to editline.  libedit and libeditline appear to be two different libraries.

I was under the impression that libedit is the desirable one (it's what *BSD uses - coming originally from NetBSD if I understand correctly - which is how it wound up being macOS's choice).  I could also be wrong.

Is there a relationship between libedit and libeditline?  They both look like useful non-GPL readline alternatives.

We're building CPython internally at Google with libedit instead of readline of late and our initial patch to do this looks similar (though simpler) than your PR's readline.c changes.  The #ifdef __APPLE__ checks are replaced with a #ifdef HAVE_LIBEDIT check which we set in our pyconfig.h.

I'm interested in seeing this stuff get in one way or another, there's no reason we should tie people to GNU readline. :)