Re: RFD: deprecate permissions-related stuff in System.Directory

Simon Marlow wrote some fairly convincing arguments against the universal use of get/setPermissions:

These functions are hardly ever used.

There are a few more uses of `getPermissions`, but as pointed out above, these are usually flawed. In any case they can usually be replaced by openFile.

I have a perfectly OK use of getPermissions: in hmake, there is a routine that scans the PATH variable looking for an executable with a given name. Basically, it is a Haskell implementation of the unix 'which' command. There is no actual use of the executable, just a test to report/reject the candidate pathname. Regards, Malcolm