On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 9:30 PM, Aristotle Pagaltzis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > * Graham Barr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2008-08-11 03:05]: >> On Aug 9, 2008, at 8:38 PM, Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote: >>> * Todd Rinaldo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2008-08-10 03:35]: >>>> What alternatives do you recommend? >>> >>> See Tom Heady's reply on this thread. >> >> Which also as issues, albeit maybe fewer. > > Yes, it will fail in some very rare cases. > > However, it does so loudly and predictably. > > In contrast, FindBin tries to avoid failing by employing > heuristics, and as we all know that is a fancy word for saying > "it doesn't work." Unsurprisingly, when it fails, it fails > silently with bizarre results – as it did for Gabor. > > Both failure modes are very rare, which means FindBin almost > never needs to fall back on heuristics, which is why people tend > to think I'm just nitpicking when I point out that it's broken as > designed and should not be used. But I dislike software that can > fail silently with bizarre results as a matter of principle. And > when the heuristic is there to catch an almost irrelevant failure > mode, its extremely disproportionate surprise potential just > isn't worth it, IMO. > >> IIRC when FindBin was written there were some system where $0 >> was not a full path when the script was invoked via PATH, which >> was why FindBin was implemented to do the PATH search. But that >> was over a decade ago and I cannot remember which OS it was on, >> so who knows if it is still in use today. > > I guess it might make some sense under those circumstances. But > in that case it should have done the PATH search only on affected > platforms, not everywhere. (Ideally it would specifically probe, > if possible in any way, for whether the heuristic was needed.) > > Anyway, shoulda coulda woulda… that horse has long left the barn.
It sounds like there's a good case here for defaulting this off and making path searching an option.
