Proposal: System.FilePath: current directory should be ".", not ""

[Ben Moseley]

Thanks for the comments - I'll look at incorporating them into pathtype.

(I've taken the liberty of filing this along with Duncan's comments  
as: http://trac.haskell.org/pathtype/ticket/2).

--Ben

On 16 Nov 2009, at 08:20, wren ng thornton wrote:

> Ben Moseley wrote:
>> Duncan Coutts wrote:
>>> My intuition with file paths in Cabal, is that this distinction  
>>> would
>>> catch more bugs. Ideally cabal's building code would be  
>>> independent of
>>> the current directory, but the fact that relative paths get
>>> automagically completed to being relative to the current directory  
>>> means
>>> that it's very easy to break this property.
>>
>> [...]
>>
>>> There are various other distinctions one could try to make, the  
>>> question
>>> becomes which type distinctions are useful and when does it just  
>>> become
>>> too much.
>>
>> I think this is a very important point. It's definitely a balancing  
>> act. I have
>> ondered whether even capturing Abs/Rel was overkill, but my current  
>> feeling
>> (not yet based on much real-world experience) is that it is worth it.
>
> Having done a lot of system administration and metaprogramming of  
> system
> administration, I can certainly say that making the relative/absolute
> distinction is helpful for tracking down bugs. From the same set of
> experience I'd say that Duncan's incomplete/complete distinction would
> be even more helpful.
>
> With a lot of sysadmin metaprogramming (which includes package
> installers) what people are really working on is grafting different
> trees together. It's important to distinguish which paths/trees are
> being created and don't yet refer to an actual or potential file on  
> the
> disk, from those paths/trees which refer to actual/potential files on
> the disk.
>
> To think about why this distinction is helpful, consider where all we
> may want to attach the paths/trees we're creating. The two obvious
> places are / and . but there are other options too. Most programs
> support some notion of a $PATH variable or allow flags to specify the
> target directory for reading or writing. With the complete/incomplete
> distinction we distinguish names which aren't yet grounded from names
> that refer to files, regardless of where they're mounted. With the
> relative/absolute distinction we don't know when a path is finished
> being constructed, and we also have no real vocabulary for expressing
> paths relative from some point other than the current directory.
>
> Most sysadmins don't seem to realize they're doing tree grafting when
> they mess with this stuff, so I can see why it might seem foreign, but
> viewing it that way really does help clean code up and find bugs. Tree
> grafting also forms a monad, which could be helpful for some folks.
>
> -- 
> Live well,
> ~wren
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