however, i seem to be missing a way to close a channel? am i misinterpreting this library?
They're not attached to Handles -- that's the IO loop that does the writing to the Chan's job -- so they dont' really have a 'close'.
i was indeed looking for a haskell-internal replacement for Handles, being somewhat surprised that i can't seem to create unattached Handles with the uls (usual library suspects;-). think pipes: if an external process takes input via a handle and provides output via a handle, the haskell equivalent could do the same via a Chan, so it'd be easy to write mixed pipes.
When you're done writing, just stop writing.
yes, but any user of getChanContents will be left hanging! that kind of function doesn't really work well without a way to tell it that it has nothing more to wait for.
I often use Chan (Maybe a), with Nothing to tell the reader thread that EOF is reached -- perhaps something like that is what you're looking for?
yes. but that would add another slight indirection, and it still doesn't make getChanContents itself any more useable. if you "often" have to modify/expand the API when you use it, perhaps there is something missing in that API? the "much like hGetContents" comment does seem to suggest that as well. claus