Neil Mitchell wrote:
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.
What does the "local" in openTempFileLocal mean? I'd be perfectly happy to have non-race-free implementations of openTempFile for certain compilers/platforms as long as we document it (not that we document openTempFile properly at all at the moment, which is a bug). Also note that you can't use or <.> here, because filepath is not in base :-)
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.
I quite agree. Care to send a patch, or open a ticket? Cheers, Simon