On 25 January 2005 19:45, Duncan Coutts wrote:
On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 19:12 +0000, Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote:
My concern here is that someone will actually use the library once it ships, with the following consequences:
1. Programs using the library will have predictable (exploitable) bugs in pathname handling.
2. It will never be possible to change the current weird behavior, because it might break legacy code. The System.FilePath library will have to remain in GHC forever in its current form, enticing programmers with its promise of easy pathname handling and then cruelly breaking its contract.
If no one uses it in production code then we can fix it at our leisure, and having it out there with "experimental" status isn't necessarily a bad thing in that case. It just feels like we're playing a dangerous game.
That's a sufficiently persuasive argument for me!
Could we just punt this library for this release. After all we can add libraries in a later point release (eg 6.4.1) you just can't change existing APIs.
We can't add libraries in a point release, because there's no way for code to use conditional compilation to test the patchlevel version number. This seems to be a common misconception, probably brought about by the fact that the time between major releases of GHC is getting quite long. Perhaps I should stop writing email and get some work done :) Cheers, Simon