Suggestion: make cabal new-install install to ~/.local/bin (or use XDG directories more generally)

[athas]

For as long as I've been using Cabal, cabal install has installed to ~/.cabal/bin. This is fine if you know that's what it does, as it is little work to add it to your PATH. It is still work, though, and most other languages/build tools seem to be standardising on ~/.local/bin (it is part of the systemd file-hierarchy spec which is slowly becoming the default as far as I can see). I think it would be better if cabal install installed to this location as well, as it would increase the likelyhood that the installation directory is already on the PATH of the user.

[hvr]

For reference, #680 was the original more ambitious feature request to migrate cabal over to XDG wholesale. However, I wouldn't consider this ticket a duplicate, but rather a more scope focused enhancement focusing on merely trying to bring the symlink-bindir into alignment w/ XDG conventions.

We still need to figure out a reasonable migration path and some heuristics to go along with this, but I believe we can reasonably try to target this for the cabal 3.0 milestone, especially if we don't become overly ambitious :-)

[athas]

This missed 3.0, unfortunately. Is there still interest in doing this or should I close the issue? I still personally think the use of ~/.cabal/bin is a UX defect.

[Mikolaj]

Duplicate of #680