[Haskell] System.FilePath survey

[Krasimir Angelov]

Hello Haskellers,

There was a long discussion in October 2004, about the a FilePath
module which is currently used in Cabal. There was an idea to move it
to the standard libraries but since there were a lot of objections it
was removed.

http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2004-October/002591.html

I would like to hear what the community think we need for the proper
file path handling. This module is important if we would like to make
Haskell more portable.
Please answer to the following questions:

    * Have you used the existing FilePath module and what do you think
about it?
Do you found it useful? Have you made any significant bugfixes or
extensions to it?

    * Will you be happy with a library that represents the file path
as String? The opposite is to use ADT for it. The disadvantage is that
with the current IO library we should convert from ADT to String and
back again each time when we have to do any IO. The ADT may have
advantages for the internal library implementation.

    * Do you think that we have to use unboxed arrays of Word8/Word16
for file path?

Any other suggestions are welcome. Since such kind of discussions are
going to be rather long please reply to libraries at haskell.org

Cheers,
  Krasimir