[Haskell-cafe] RE: ANN: System.FilePath 0.9

[David Roundy]

On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 11:39:40AM -0700, Andrew Pimlott wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 03:29:01PM +0200, Udo Stenzel wrote:
> > Andrew Pimlott wrote:
> > > Also, it looks from this that you treat paths differently depending on
> > > whether they end in a separator.  Yet this makes no difference to the
> > > system.  That seems wrong to me.
> > 
> > Not to the system, but some programs like to make a difference.
>
> How does it make a difference?  Do you have an answer that applies
> uniformly to all programs?  If not, aren't we just walking down a blind
> alley?  I've heard that Emacs treats double-separators specially.  Do we
> account for that too?

cp(1), for example, treats paths with trailing separators differently
from paths without.

rm -rf foo bar
echo test > foo
echo othertest > bar
cp foo bar/
cp foo bar

It's part of the user interface, that allows the user to specify that
he or she intends to use a path to describe a directory.

This doesn't apply uniformly to all programs--except that we can say
that any path with a trailing '/' is intended to be a directory, and
if it's not, then that's an error.  But the trouble is that if you
silently drop the '/', then the only way for me to implement a correct
cp(1) in Haskell is to not use your proposed interface for pathname
handling, which drops this information.

I'd also point out that rieser4, for instance, treats paths with a
trailing slash differently even for files.  True, it's probably not a
good idea, but if we're talking about a portable library we might want
it to work even on systems running an "interesting" filesystem like
rieser4.
-- 
David Roundy