[Haskell-cafe] Re: ANN: System.FilePath 0.9

Simon Marlow simonmarhaskell at gmail.com
Wed Jul 26 04:19:18 EDT 2006


Neil Mitchell wrote:

>> I'm not sure about canonicalPath.  This interface seems to suffer from 
>> the same
>> race conditions as the temporary file interface: the answer is 
>> immediately
>> invalid, so you can't rely on it.
> 
> The main purpose of canoncialPath is to fix the case on Windows, so
> "c:\my documents\file.doc" becomes "C:\My Documents\file.doc" if that
> is the case correct version of the file. I think this function will
> not actually change the file with relation to the underying file
> system, so should be race free. (I will document more to make the
> operation clearer)

Right, as Krasimir pointed out we already have 
System.Directory.canonicalizePath.  Incedentally, this version removes "/../" in 
a symlink-friendly way on Unix, because it uses realpath() underneath.  It also 
works with relative pathnames, prepending the current directory.

>> Then this seems inconsistent with the naming of splitFileName, which 
>> should be splitFilePath.
> 
> No, since its splits a FilePath into a FileName and the rest left
> over. In the same way that splitExtension takes a FilePath, but splits
> into an extension. I have named the operations by the result, rather
> than the input (which is almost always a FilePath)

It seems a bit odd because splitFileName follows the usual verb-noun convention, 
but in this case the verb doesn't refer to the noun.  Not all the oeprations are 
named by the result: eg. dropFileName.  That follows the verb-noun convention in 
the normal way.

>> Isn't joinFilename the same as combine?
> 
> Yes, I hadn't spotted thats (the code is duplicated, and written in a
> different style). However I feel its useful to have both of them in
> there, since having the join/split duality is quite handy, and combine
> "conceptually" operates on a lot more than just filenames.

I'd rather not have duplication because that can lead to confusion too - but at 
least it should be clearly documented.  Certainly we should not have all of

   joinFileName, combine, addFileName

since they all do the same thing.  Also,

   getDirectory, dropFileName

do the same thing.

(btw, don't take all this as criticism, it's great that you're spending time on 
this and I think it's worth sanding down the rough edges so we can incorporate 
it in the base package).

Cheers,
	Simon


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