Where should cabal install to by default?

[Jeffrey Yasskin]

On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 3:40 PM, Isaac Dupree <isaacdupree at charter.net> wrote:
> 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