behaviour change in getDirectoryContents in GHC 7.2?

[John Lask]

for what it is worth, I would like to see both System.IO and Directory
export "internal functions" where the filepath is a Raw Byte representation.

I have utilities that regularly scan 100,000 of files and hash the path
the details of which are irrelevant to this discussion, the point being
that the locale encoding/decoding is not relevant in this situation and
adds unnecessary overhead that would affect the speed of the file-system
scans.

A  denotation of a filepath as an uninterpreted sequence of bytes is the
lowest common denominator for all systems that I know of and would be
worthwhile to export from the system libraries upon which other
abstractions can be built.

I agree that for the general user the current behavior is sufficient,
however exporting the raw interface would be beneficial for some users,
for instance those that have responded to this thread.


On 7/11/2011 2:42 AM, Max Bolingbroke wrote:
> On 6 November 2011 04:14, John Millikin<jmillikin at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> For what it's worth, on my Ubuntu system, Nautilus ignores the locale
>> and just treats all paths as either UTF8 or invalid.
>> To me, this seems like the most reasonable option; the concept of
>> "locale encoding" is entirely vestigal, and should only be used in
>> certain specialized cases.
> 
> Unfortunately non-UTF8 locale encodings are seen in practice quite
> often. I'm not sure about Linux, but certainly lots of Windows systems
> are configured with a locale encoding like GBK or Big5.
> 
>> Paths as text is what *Windows* programmers expect. Paths as bytes is
>> what's expected by programmers on non-Windows OSes, including Linux
>> and OS X.
> 
> IIRC paths on OS X are guaranteed to be valid UTF-8. The only platform
> that uses bytes for paths (that we care about) is Linux.
> 
>> I'm not saying one is inherently better than the other, but
>> considering that various UNIX  and UNIX-like operating systems have
>> been using byte-based paths for near on forty years now, trying to
>> abolish them by redefining the type is not a useful action.
> 
> We have to:
>   1. Provide an API that makes sense on all our supported OSes
>   2. Have getArgs :: IO [String]
>   3. Have it such that if you go to your console and write
> (./MyHaskellProgram 你好) then getArgs tells you ["你好"]
> 
> Given these constraints I don't see any alternative to PEP-383 behaviour.
> 
>> If you're going to make all the System.IO stuff use text, at least
>> give us an escape hatch. The "unix" package is ideally suited, as it's
>> already inherently OS-specific. Something like this would be perfect:
> 
> You can already do this with the implemented design. We have:
> 
> openFile :: FilePath ->  IO Handle
> 
> The FilePath will be encoded in the fileSystemEncoding. On Unix this
> will have PEP383 roundtripping behaviour. So if you want openFile' ::
> [Byte] ->  IO Handle you can write something like this:
> 
> escape = map (\b ->  if b<  128 then chr b else chr (0xEF00 + b))
> openFile = openFile' . escape
> 
> The bytes that reach the API call will be exactly the ones you supply.
> (You can also implement "escape" by just encoding the [Byte] with the
> fileSystemEncoding).
> 
> Likewise, if you have a String and want to get the [Byte] we decoded
> it from, you just need to encode the String again with the
> fileSystemEncoding.
> 
> If this is not enough for you please let me know, but it seems to me
> that it covers all your use cases, without any need to reimplement the
> FFI bindings.
> 
> Max
> 
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