From what I gathered, it appears to me that adhering to the XDGBD Spec (on Linux at least) is desirable and "strongly encouraged" by Linux distributions[2], so I think this ought to be implemented sooner rather

Hello *, I'd like to invite everyone with knowledge of the XDG Base Directory Specification[1] to contribute to https://github.com/haskell/directory/issues/6 than later (maybe even in time to be part of GHC 7.10.1) This issue was originally filed against GHC, since it affects the location of the `~/.ghc` folder (and fwiw this would also affect cabal's `~/.cabal` folder location). Thanks, hvr [1]: http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html [2]: https://wiki.debian.org/XDGBaseDirectorySpecification