Feature or enhancement

Proposal:

Currently we support two backends with readline: GNU readline and editline. They work in a similar way but have some differences. Notably the way to set<tab> as the complete key.

The users need to distinguish the backend at run time, and currently the recommended way is:

if'libedit'ingetattr(readline,'__doc__',''):

We have worse checks like

readline_doc=getattr(readline,'__doc__','')ifreadline_docisnotNoneand'libedit'inreadline_doc:

insite.py.

It would be nice to provide a more official and clean way to check the backend, instead of querying for the docstring for the module. This is also mentioned in#107748 (comment) by@encukou .

In this proposal, a new attributebackend is added which could be eitherreadline oreditline.

Has this already been discussed elsewhere?

This is a minor feature, which does not need previous discussion elsewhere

Links to previous discussion of this feature:

No response

Linked PRs

• gh-112510: Addreadline.backend for the backend readline uses #112511