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

[wren ng thornton]

Duncan Coutts wrote:
> Some people have mentioned before that some systems (though not the
> native low level POSIX interfaces) do actually distinguish "./blah/blah"
> from "blah/blah". The distinction is whether a file is relative to the
> current directory or to some other unspecified root (eg a search path).
> Unix shells make this distinction for example when running "a.out" vs
> "./a.out". The latter is independent of the current $PATH, it really
> refers to the one in the current directory, not any such file on the
> $PATH.

Just for reference, this comes up with shell settings other than just 
$PATH as well. For instance, cd in Bash looks through $CDPATH in the 
same way command selection looks through $PATH (i.e. the default value 
is "." which is sensible, but some folks like ".:~" to make their home 
dir everywhere, and you can do crazier things). And various other 
programs have their own $*PATH variables.


> On a related note, when I have experimented with designing a typed
> version of FilePath, one of the things I wanted to distinguish in the
> types is exactly this thing about "relative to something specific" (eg
> relative to "/" or ".") vs "relative to something not yet specified".
> Another terminology might be "complete" and "incomplete". The OS file
> manipulation functions would only work on complete filepaths.

I like this distinction. Regardless of the settlement of "" vs "./", it 
is helpful to distinguish "paths being built" (and therefore potentially 
invalid) from "real paths" anchored to the file system.

-- 
Live well,
~wren