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chromatic asked for some
link/follow-ups love to his
"Modern Perl Books" blog,
so here's a post inspired by one of his
Modern Perl posts where he complains about how inane the File-Find
interface is. I personally share chromatic's sentiments about File-Find,
and have for many years. After posting
to perl5-porters about its shortcomings, it was agreed that fixing them in
File-Find may hurt its performance, and so was not acceptable without forking
the code or rewriting it. At the end of the thread, I mentioned that I found
File-Find-Object
on CPAN, and that I intend to contribute to it and improve it. That's what I
did, and I eventually took over its maintenance from the originator.
File-Find-Object solves all the major shortcomings of File-Find that I'm
aware of. But this post is not specifically about File-Find-Object. If someone
will come up with a better alternative to File-Find than File-Find-Object
is, then I'll support the new code.
The point is that I think that, as a statement of intent, and of general
disgust from File::Find, a different module with a better interface
and a saner and more modern philosophy should be shipped as part of
the perl 5 core. It's not the first time that a core module in perl 5 was
"complemented" with a better alternative: CPANPLUS.pm was added to the core
in addition to CPAN.pm , Module::Build was added as an alternative to
ExtUtils::MakeMaker, and recently Test::Harness was augmented with
TAP::Parser/TAP::Harness/Test::Harness-3 . I don't see why File::Find should
be any different considering the fact it has several philosophical
usability problems which cannot be easily overcome (it cannot be instantiated,
cannot be easily interrupted in the middle, and does not have an iterative
interface).
I don't suggest we change the File::Find API. That will wreck havoc. But
I think we should include another module and put a big and visible notice
at the beginning of File::Find saying
"File::Find is deprecated and should no longer be used! Use
$better_file_find , that ships with perl as of perl-5.12.0 or available from
CPAN for earlier versions, instead."
What do you think?
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