https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1867290
--- Comment #5 from Jens Petersen petersen@redhat.com --- Thanks, Andy, sorry for the long pause - the license was identified and cleared by Fedora Legal in August as:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/Henry_Spencer_Reg-Ex_Library_Licens...
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/legal@lists.fedoraproject.org/...
though I got a couple of discouraging comments along the lines of "Why another libedit"... which while I tend to agree with, I still think this package is useful for people trying to build nix [1]. Apparently nix can be configured (via envvars) to build with readline, but with reduced functionality (this was added because the version of editline in Debian/Ubuntu is very old based on the original one). I guess it is a question for nix upstream why they chose this lesser known library for its repl: well there is some upstream discussion on it, see for example https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/1356
[1] particularly since it is unlikely we can ever ship nix properly in Fedora, unless we do what Debian does and ship the binary without setting up the system /nix directories.