Why is System.Posix.Error in unix?

[Simon Marlow]

Ian Lynagh wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 20, 2007 at 05:20:36PM +0000, Aaron Denney wrote:
>> On 2007-07-19, Ian Lynagh <igloo at earth.li> wrote:
>>> I get the feeling I must be missing something, but why is
>>> System.Posix.Error in the unix package? It looks to me like it just
>>> calls things in the base package, and it works on Windows as far as I
>>> can see:
>> AIUI:
>>
>> Because it's about the Posix "errno" interface, and nobody uses the
>> posix subsystem of windows because it doesn't interact well with the GUI
>> subsystem?
> 
> That might make sense to me, except the getErrno function that actually
> gets the errorno is in base:Foreign.C.Error, and it (well, under the
> non-hierarchical name CError) is specified in the FFI spec.
> 
> In fact, now I look more closely, it also defines a number of
> throwErrno* functions; it's only the throwErrnoPath* functions that are
> in unix:System.Posix.Error. This all seems very odd!

errno is defined by C99 (as well as POSIX), so it's reasonable to put 
errno-related stuff in Foreign.C.Error.  When I needed to add some 
error-related functionality for the POSIX library, I didn't want to add 
extra stuff to Foreign.C.Error beyond what was specified in the FFI spec, 
so I added System.Posix.Error instead.  This was just conservative; we 
could probably add throwErrnoPath and friends to Foreign.C.Error (with the 
usual proposal process).

Cheers,
	Simon