On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 5:26 AM, Duncan Coutts wrote:
Oh, great. I didn't know OS X had a standard location for per-user installs. That's excellent. So is there a preferred layout for those dirs? I'm guessing there probably is.
* ~/.cabal is bad on Mac OS, too. Preferences ought to go into ~/ Library/Preferences/
~/Library/Preferences should only be used if the .plist format is supported. In general, I agree with Brendan that unixy programs don't belong here, and I'm happy with .cabal. However, if you want to use the OSX dirs, I would think that most of the items in .cabal could be placed in ~/Library/Application Support/Cabal/. Unlike most other standard directories, this appears to be completely application-dependent.
Ok. BTW, in that case we should probably fix System.Directory.getAppUserDataDirectory to follow the system convention on OSX. Currently it uses $HOME/.appname on all unix systems (and the Windows convention on Windows). If necessary we may want to split getAppUserDataDirectory into a variant for config and another for data.
Since cabal-install is a program should it still be using ~/Library/Preferences/ or is there are corresponding ~/Applications/Preferences/ ? Where would be appropriate for cabal-install put its download cache and build logs?
All preferences are in ~/Library/Preferences/, in Apple's .plist format. There is no ~/Applications/Preferences/. Build logs should go in ~/Library/Logs/, either in a subdirectory or directly in this folder. There is a ~/Library/Caches/, but I believe that's reserved for the NSURL cache (accessed through Cocoa).
It's less clear what we'd do on windows if we want versioned binaries since there are no links.
I have personally ended up just copying the latest version of "appname-n.n.n" to "appname". Granted I've only done that on my own computer, never as part of an install process. John Lato