Re: Proposal: removeDirectoryRecursive should not follow symlinks

On 2015-01-06 14:57, Mike Meyer wrote:

On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 7:48 AM, Johan Tibell wrote:

...

This is not a bugfix. A bug is failing to follow the functions specification, which *does* include following symlinks.

It's a bug in the design, not the code. The API it provides is useful, but dangerous and less useful than the safe version.

Breaking the API has been proposed. If we're going to do that, why not add a followSymlinks ::Bool argument as well, and document why the API was broken in this way. Going forward, at least. Not sure about backwards.

Because *nobody* wants to follow symlinks when doing "rm -rf". Even if they think they do, they *really* don't. Any design which relies on it is probably fundamentally broken. (If they're *really really* sure, they can write their own.) Btw, a Bool argumnent usually isn't a good idea. Better API design would be data SymlinkBehavior = FollowSymlinks | NoFollowSymlinks (so that it's easy to tell at all call sites what it's doing.). However, without default arguments this is forcing a pointless decision upon the user, i.e. 99.9%+ of all usages should be using NoFollow, so why force the user of the API to decide? Even with such a change, I don't think the functionality should exist in a "standard" library. (I won't repeat all the arguments; see the rest of the thread :)) Regards,