Whenever you suspect a bug, if possible, please reconfigure with
./configure --enable-debug and run rlwrap with a -d7 option. This will
create a file /tmp/rlwrap.debug that will help you (or me) find the
problem.

Many (most) bug reports, especially the really weird ones, stem from
"version skew" on distributions (RedHat, Debian) that have separate
development packages (e.g. readline and readline-dev). For some reason
it can happen that the devel package is out of sync with the main
package, and then really strange things may happen. So: always update your 
{readline, ncurses}-devel packages before you complain to me!
* General inadequacy and weak spots:

The more sophisticated the terminal handling of rlwrapped program (the
"client") gets, the less rlwrap will be able to maintain its
transparency.  Of course, more sophisticated programs generally have
less need for rlwrap.


* Installation problems:

---

rlwrap needs the readline library (ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/readline/),
version 4.2 or newer. For .deb or .rpm users: install the readline
-devel- package!

---

Even though rlwrap now uses the excellent pseudo-terminal (pty)
handling code from rxvt, portable programming with ptys is something
of a black art. The configure script tries to guess how ptys have to
be handled on your system, but it may guess wrong. To quote rxvt's
configure script: "if we don't guess right then it's up to the user",
which means that you have to manually edit config.h, and save a copy
of it somewhere, as configure will re-create config.h

---

Andreas Leitgeb wrote:

  "If (on Solaris) configure fails to detect your libreadline, 
  then (temporarily) move the dynamic libs libreadline.so*
  out of sight, and try again. (seems to be a problem in the
  readline-package obtained from sunfreeware.com)"

-- 

On recent OS X sytems, libreadline is not the real thing, but a
non-GNU replacement. If the linker complains about missing
symbols, install GNU readline and try again.

--
After "configure", make wil re-run configure. This is a minor
annoyance, and probably due to my poor understanding of automake. 

* Run-time problems

rlwrap cannot handle prompts that contain control characters (except
ANSI colour), though you may not notice this until your cursor almost
reaches end-of-line


---

Christoffer Dam Bruun reported:

  "I have just installed rlwrap along with readline on Solaris 8 and
  found that rlwrap did not work properly with readline 4.3. After
  linking rlwrap with readline 4.2 it works correctly.

  What happended using readline 4.3 was that an extra prompt would be 
  written after the first letter on a line, e.g. with a sqlplus prompt:
  SQL>
  (now writing select )
  SQL> sSQL> select"

I (HL) have not been able to reproduce this, but there have been a few
more reports about this. In a few cases, the display was even more
garbled, like

  SQL> sSQL> se>SQL> selSQL> sele>SQL> selec> .... 

Remedy: first make sure that your readline headers and runtime
libraries are in sync. May people have a readline-dev package that is
older than their runtime libraries. If this doesn't help: configure
rlwrap with --enable-homegrown-redisplay and recompile.


---
Readline 5.0 has a slight bug where scrolling up through history and
then back again ends on a non-empty line (the first history line, in
fact). 

---

The -m option uses the system() (3) library function to call an
external editor. I'm not quite sure how system() handles signals like
TSTP an WINCH (and "system" is a difficult name to Google for...)
Re-sizing the terminal may confuse the editor

--

Paolo Casaschi reported that his rlwrap failed with the message
  
  rlwrap: error: Could not open slave pty: Permission denied

This turned out to be a problem with /etc/fstab, where the entry for
/dev/pty was:

  none    /dev/pts    devpts  gid=5,mode=20            0 0 

instead of 

  none   /dev/pts     devpts  gid=5,mode=620           0 0
  
which fixed the problem

-- 

The code that determines whether a cooked prompt should be overwritten
(when it turns out to not have been a prompt) is needlessly complex
and not quite correct (e.g. substitute prompts may be left standing
when they should be erased). This is a rather major rewrite, expected
in rlwrap-0.38


