On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 3:40 PM, Isaac Dupree
Duncan Coutts wrote:
On Linux I'm not sure where else we could put things that's per-user. People seem to object strenuously to programs automatically putting files in any dir other than ~/.progname (or one or two other .files established by specification or convention).
just a thought:
If you're into this standard http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html , we could use $XDG_CACHE_HOME/cabal or $XDG_DATA_HOME/cabal by default (depending whether you think what Cabal installs is just a cache, or not) ( the default values to use for those if not defined are $HOME/.cache and $HOME/.local/share ). Various things, not all X-related, use that convention/standard; the search-paths ($XDG_DATA_DIRS, $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS) can come in handy to separate my own configuration from whatever's been thrown in dot-dirs too.
-Isaac
FWIW, Python recently went through this exercise and produced http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0370/, which does use the $HOME/.local directory. I don't know how much that should affect Cabal's choice, but it's a bit of prior art if you're interested. Jeffrey