Proposal: overhaul System.Process

[David Roundy]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 04:22:24PM -0700, Frederik Eaton wrote:
> David Roundy-2 wrote:
> > No, createProcess is more low-level than the previous interface, which
> > is why it can't be implemented using the previous interfaces, but
> > rather they can be implemented using createProcess.  Which is why they
> > can be deprecated, although I'd hope they won't be removed for at
> > least a couple more ghc releases after createProcess is introduced.
> 
> In what way is 'createProcess' more low-level than the previous interfaces?

The easiest sense in which it's more low-level is that the previous
two commands runProcess and runInteractiveProcess can both be
implemented using createProcess, but not the other way around.

New API: (a subset thereof, actually)

createProcess :: CreateProcess
              -> IO (Maybe Handle, Maybe Handle, Maybe Handle, ProcessHandle)

data CreateProcess = CreateProcess {
  cmdspec :: CmdSpec
  cwd :: (Maybe FilePath)
  env :: (Maybe [(String, String)])
  std_in :: StdStream
  std_out :: StdStream
  std_err :: StdStream
  close_fds :: Bool
}

Old API:

runProcess :: FilePath -> [String] -> Maybe FilePath
           -> Maybe [(String, String)]
           -> Maybe Handle -> Maybe Handle -> Maybe Handle
           -> IO ProcessHandle

runInteractiveProcess :: FilePath -> [String]
                      -> Maybe FilePath -> Maybe [(String, String)]
                      -> IO (Handle, Handle, Handle, ProcessHandle)

In the old API, you are required to either use preexisting handles for
each of stdin/stdout/stderr (possibly allowing the child process to
inherit some or all of them), *or* create new pipes for all three.

You might consider trying to implement runInteractiveProcess using
runProcess (you certainly can't do the opposite) by setting up pipes
and passing them to runProcess, but there's no portable function that
can be used to do this, so you'd be out of luck.  You'd be stuck doing
what darcs has long done:  write to temporary files on disk, which is
totally braindead.

createProcess is (so far as I can tell) the lowest-level *portable*
Haskell API for spawning processes that has yet been proposed, in the
sense that there are no other proposed functions that could be used to
implement createProcess, and no other proposed functions that cannot
be implemented using createProcess.
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University