ANNOUNCE: GHC version 6.8.2

[Duncan Coutts]

On Fri, 2007-12-14 at 16:09 +0000, Simon Marlow wrote:
> Juanma Barranquero wrote:
> > On Dec 14, 2007 3:53 PM, Simon Marlow <simonmarhaskell at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> But do you really want getHomeDirectory to return $HOME?
> > 
> > Yes!
> > 
> > If I define %HOME, it is *exactly* because I don't want to use
> > Windows' idea of a home directory (which could be perhaps more
> > accurately defined as "hidden away storage area for
> > automatically-saved configuration settings").
> 
> Ok.  Unless there are any objections, this is what we'll do.

It sounds like a bad idea to me. I agree with your initial reaction and
principle that we don't want to "be baking Un*x behaviour into APIs that
are supposed to do whatever is native on the current platform."

I can just imagine the bug report and eventually figuring out that some
application the user had installed had set $HOME and this was messing up
finding files.

If a particular application (like ghci) wants to consult $HOME in
preference to getHomeDirectory it can do so. I don't think we need to
make all Haskell programs behave in a non-standard way especially since
most other programs are not going to.

On the other hand, for a cygwin build there's a very reasonable argument
for using $HOME since that's what is native for the
environment/platform. I suspect what Juanma would really like is a
cygwin build.

Duncan