Duncan Coutts wrote:
Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:
* On OS X, its not generally appropriate to install into /usr/local either. Each user has ~/Applications and ~/Library directories that are usually used for per-user installs. Just generally using sudo and put binaries into /usr/local is also bad because not every user will have admin rights on the machine.
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.
~/Applications seems to be new in OS X 10.5, I sure don't have it in 10.4. But it seems sensible nonetheless. (And it's documented here http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPFileSystem/Arti... ) Note however that the ~/Applications directory is not directly comparable to a UNIX /bin . That's because applications in Mac OS X have binaries, data and all other batteries included in one folder, the "application bundle". For instance, the Thunderbird application is really a folder "Thunderbird.app" and looks something like this ~/Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/Info.plist ~/Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird-bin -- binary ~/Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/MacOS/ ... ~/Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/PkgInfo ~/Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/Resources/thunderbird.icns -- icons ~/Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/en.lproj/ -- language specific ... etc Bare-bones UNIX binaries like cabal-install itself and those produced by cabal don't really fit that scheme. That's why Mac OS X has a standard UNIX-style tree in /usr/local . Not sure what to do with per-user cabal, I'd make a fresh UNIX-tree at ~/Applications/Cabal/ or even ~/Applications/Haskell/ so we have ~/Applications/Cabal/bin ~/Applications/Cabal/lib ~/Applications/Cabal/share etc.
* ~/.cabal is bad on Mac OS, too. Preferences ought to go into ~/ Library/Preferences/
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.
System.Directory.getAppUserDataDirectory should return ./Progname.app/Contents/Resources for programs that are packaged as OS X application bundle. Of course, that doesn't apply to most UNIX software... However, configuration files are to go in ~/Library/Preferences/ which is sufficiently similar to /etc .
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?
The ~/Library/ folder is more like /usr/etc and /usr/share than /usr/lib , so it works for both executable and shared libraries. ~/Library/Preferences/ for configuration files. ~/Library/Application Support/ for application data that you don't need to run the application. Like examples files or clip arts. ~/Library/Caches/ for cache files. ~/Library/Logs/ for logs. Some documentation from Apple: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPFileSystem/Arti... http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPFileSystem/Arti... Regards, apfelmus