On Jun 28, 2007, at 18:25 , Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
Bayley, Alistair wrote:
The unix package isn't available to Windows users. Unsurprising, maybe. But, given that it seems to be a layer over the Posix API, would it be reasonable to request that the unix package is made available on Windows?
I've been thinking about just this, too.
The underlying problem is that Haskell's portable I/O-related libraries are underpowered, particularly the stuff in System.Directory. Try doing any significant filesystem-related work using only the portable APIs and you'll see what I mean.
A portable library that put a POSIX-like wrapper atop filesystem operations would be a big win, particularly if it were distributed as a standard library. This is the approach that Python's standard libraries take, and it works well.
If I had a vote on how Ian might spend his time, it would be on something like this, which would have direct value to programmers by addressing a significant deficit of the current standard libraries. Splitting up the unix package seems more like an inconsequential janitorial task. Given finite resources, I'd prefer to tackle the task with greater benefits.
I started working on this for implementing the file operations needed by the tar package, but didn't take it further than that. Here's what I have so far: http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~bringert/darcs/unix-compat/ /Björn