Claus Reinke wrote:
Installing executable(s) in /home/david/.cabal/bin why the hell would cabal install binaries in a subdirectory of a hidden directory. Why not /home/david/bin or /home/david/local/bin ?
Yes, this is clearly suboptimal but getting agreement on where to put it has not proved easy. There are users that will scream and shout if we install to $HOME/bin by default.
Having learned from experience that user preferences differ wildly, even on similar platforms, not to mention a variety of platforms or, even worse, intentionally different forks of the same platform, and that trying to guess what defaults might be sensible, let alone acceptable, can be a losing game, I'd like to offer an alternative view:
if there is no universally acceptable default, do not use a default
+1. Given that cabal has a config file already and so users don't have to enter everything on the commandline, this seems like a remarkably straightforward solution. The only downside seems like a minor startup cost (in exchange for the major restart cost from defaults having been bad). -- Live well, ~wren