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File::HomeDir API incompatible change soon
Well, moved into new Sydney place ok. All the hard drives survived the moved ok.
The new place is a totally stereotypical geek share house.
"Hi, come on in. So, the switch is over there, and there's wireless, but a bit weak upstairs. The two X-Boxs are over there. Oh, and we're ordering takeout"
Yep
Should be a great place to settle back into living in Sydney for 6 months or a year or something.
In CPAN news, we cracked the big 10,000 modules WAY faster than I expected, thanks to someone unleashing a dozen new Kwiki modules on the world. And thanks to everyone else that released as well.
In addition, I've realised that I'm going to have to change the File::HomeDir API, seeing as there are some situations where the user has nothing whatsoever that could be construed as a "home directory".
So all methods are going to need to change to return undef in this case. Note that this doesn't change the fact that File::HomeDir will -d and confirm a directory exists before returning it, it just means you are going to need to work out for everything that uses it how to deal with no-homedir situations, and this will force people into it.
I've filed about 15 rt.cpan.org bugs with the people that use it I can detect, so they (and you) have a couple of months before I make the actual change.
Hopefully there won't be too much trouble, as currently File::HomeDir just dies in the situations that have no home directory.
because that's exactly how much difference there is. :-)
--Larry Wall in <10209@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Why undef? (Score:1)
Re:Why undef? (Score:1)
In fact, File::HomeDir already has a number of these in it. Generally, it's things like failing to find a directory where it is expecting one. If someone hacked their OS X directories to something unusual, you might see it.
However, as I push outwards to try and cover more platform and situations, I'm finding that lack of a home directory is much much more common than I had thought (or than the original author thought as well I suspect).
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