expand tilde to home in pathnames

[daxim]

--install-to=~/local/share/perl6 treats the tilde as literal character, making it a pathname relative to the current directory. That's running counter to rule of least surprise. To fix this, either

• conform to getopt_long and allow options to be supplied in the form without equal character, thus: --install-to ~/local/share/perl6 so that the shell takes care of expanding the tilde
• or call glob(3) on the pathname in order to expand the tilde

[ugexe]

Maybe you should file a bug about least surprise to rakudo about issues you have with tilde expansion.

[Leont]

Having a sensible implementation of ~/ should be trivial. Replacing ~/ with %*ENV<HOME> on uix, and %*ENV<USER_PROFILE> on Windows should do the trick.

[AlexDaniel]

Wait, why? ~ is a thing in shells, zef is not a shell. If I wanted to install into ~ directory (yes, directory named ~) then I'd expect zef to do what I told it to do, not to reinterpret the path in weird shell ways.

[tony-o]

++@AlexDaniel, that sounds like an upstream feature request

[Leont]

Wait, why? ~ is a thing in shells, zef is not a shell. If I wanted to install into ~ directory (yes, directory named ~) then I'd expect zef to do what I told it to do, not to reinterpret the path in weird shell ways.

Because it's useful, and a lot of people will expect it.

This would not be necessary if perl6 took arguments like «--install-to ~/local/share/perl6», but sadly it doesn't by default.

[AlexDaniel]

@Leont but you can use $HOME env variable, and you can even hit C-M-e in bash to expand it right away.

Zef should not mangle arguments. I doubt any proper tool in existence does that.

[Leont]

I doubt any proper tool in existence does that.

Proper makes it a no true scotsman argument, but I have maintained tools that did this (e.g. Module::Build

[AlexDaniel]

Proper makes it a no true scotsman argument, but I have maintained tools that did this

Correct. But I'm more interested in seeing their justification (if there is any, which I originally doubted, so that we wouldn't need to do bikeshedding ourselves) than playing fallacy games. From the ticket for Module::Build:

perl Build.PL --install_base=~ causes everything to be installed into a subdirectory literally called '~'. Even though this is not technically Module::Build's fault, its the shell, its very surprising and very dangerous as a user will instinctively do "rm -rf ~" and blow away their home directory. I nearly did so.

That's interesting. I don't know if --install-to=~ reasoning can be applied here though.