[GHC] #5014: canonicalizePath throws exception on paths that do not exist

[GHC]

#5014: canonicalizePath throws exception on paths that do not exist
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        Reporter:  hesselink            |            Owner:
            Type:  bug                  |           Status:  new
        Priority:  low                  |        Milestone:  7.6.2
       Component:  libraries/directory  |          Version:  7.0.2
      Resolution:                       |         Keywords:
Operating System:  Unknown/Multiple     |     Architecture:
 Type of failure:  Runtime crash        |  Unknown/Multiple
       Test Case:                       |       Difficulty:  Unknown
        Blocking:                       |       Blocked By:
                                        |  Related Tickets:
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Comment (by Blaisorblade):

 Documenting the current behavior is better than nothing, but settling on
 that seems a regression from portable languages to C.

 I want to argue that settling on platform-dependent behavior is a worse
 idea than figuring out a sensible platform-independent behavior, possibly
 by surveying other languages (Python as proposed above, or maybe Java).
 Additional system-specific APIs are probably fine for lower-level
 development, but they seem lower-priority to me.

 This bug keeps causing portability problems for Haskell applications. I
 remember cabal needed fixing for this; right now I ran into this for
 hp2any-graph, which tries to canonicalize a filename that is going to
 appear. Therefore, quite a few programs that use canonicalizePath and were
 developed on Linux only break on other platforms.

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Ticket URL: <http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5014#comment:16>
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