#688: adopt XDG basedir spec ---------------------------------+------------------------------------------ Reporter: guest | Owner: Type: enhancement | Status: new Priority: low | Milestone: Component: cabal-install tool | Version: 1.8.0.4 Severity: normal | Keywords: Difficulty: hard (< 1 day) | Ghcversion: 6.10.4 Platform: Linux | ---------------------------------+------------------------------------------ Changes (by guest): * priority: normal => low * difficulty: easy (<4 hours) => hard (< 1 day) * version: 1.8.0.2 => 1.8.0.4 * severity: minor => normal Comment: Sorry for neglecting to answer right away, I forgot about this bug for a few days because I didn't bother to jump through the hoops to be able to receive change notification. If by standard you mean ''de facto'' just everyone's been doing it like that, then I agree. And since indeed everyone's been doing that, I end up with hundreds of dotdirs in my home directory. This sucks because their content is essentially unstructured. The problem is that I want to treat files differently according to their purpose; and there are '''not just application files'''. There are also configuration files, they are put under version control. There are cache files, they are excluded from backup and indexing. You know that a software package in Linux is not just dumped into a single directory somewhere, but the files are sorted into directories which each have a certain meaning. [http://www.pathname.com/fhs/ FHS] governs the semantics for the system layout, [http://standards.freedesktop.org /basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html FDO's XDG base directory specification] governs this for a user's directory. These are real standards, and they enable all sorts of interoperability that would not be possible with unstructured directory contents. Whether you want to adopt the spec in order to sort files into their appropriate XDG location by default is up to you. Thanks to your hint about {{{--config-file}}} I was able to move away the last file and delete {{{.cabal}}} for good, so certainly a compliant layout is already possible (through careful configuration, as I said before) if a user wants it. -- Ticket URL: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/688#comment:2 Hackage http://haskell.org/cabal/ Hackage: Cabal and related projects