Hi
Perhaps as a first step, rather than just omitting them from the export list where they aren't supported, they should be replaced by dummy definitions that emit a helpful error message?
Like canonicalizeFilePath, which has a dummy implementation everywhere? It's frustrating to have a standard base library which isn't standard and portable. I realise that the reason that this was added was for race-free temporary file creation, but until they are available on Hugs, my code will use a race-full implementation everywhere, including GHC. Could we perhaps have an implementation of this function for all other compilers: -- Note: openTempFile is not available on Hugs, which sucks openTempFileLocal :: FilePath -> String -> IO (FilePath, Handle) openTempFileLocal dir template = do i <- randomRIO (1000::Int,9999) let (file,ext) = splitExtension template s = dir (file ++ show i) <.> ext b <- doesFileExist s if b then openTempFileLocal dir template else do h <- openFile s ReadWriteMode return (s, h) That's what I use everywhere.
I suspect there are many such examples in the base package, FWIW. nch98 doesn't implement various bits of System.IO.Error, for example. Hugs has a very different version of Control.Concurrent.
I think these should be made very explicit in the documentation. Control.Concurrent is understandable, things like file creation methods aren't - a user will be annoyed (and I was) to find that their program written according to the documentation doesn't work. Thanks Neil