Should libedit be preferred to libreadline?

The problem as stated is that people don't want to maintain lists of
libraries as needed by each program, so we link all of them.

Since it seems to always be the same few libraries that cause us
problems, maybe a simpler approach would be to, in the Makefile, use
filter-out to exclude libraries you *know* aren't needed. Like in the
Makefile we put:

postgres: $(OBJS)
$(CC) $(CFLAGS) $(LDFLAGS) $(export_dynamic) $^ $(filter-out -lreadline -ledit, $(LIBS)) -o $@

So instead of maintaining lists of what each binary needs, we can
maintain a few lists of what certain binaries *don't* need. Actually, I
think the backend is the only thing important enough to worry about
this, although if readline is exporting memcpy that it's quite possible
other binaries might be affected. Maybe create a BACKEND_LIBS which
contains a shorter list.

Even the GCC --as-needed flag can't save you from libs exporting
functions they shouldn't...

Have a nice day,