Proper XDG_CONFIG_HOME usage about brew HOT 6 CLOSED

We can't do this now without breaking backwards compatibility.

People/places who care about XDG_CONFIG_HOME already set it and we respect it. If we don't: that's a bug. We're permanently a macOS package manager where freedesktop.org standards do not apply.

Passing on this, sorry.

from brew.

See related discussion at #15787 (comment).

from brew.

We can't do this now without breaking backwards compatibility.

If you were still looking for $HOME/.homebrew/brew.env if the other file didn't exists, how would that break backward compatibility? The only scenario I can think of is if someone has a $HOME/.config/homebrew/brew.env but hasn't set $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, which wouldn't make much sense.

from brew.

People/places who care about XDG_CONFIG_HOME already set it and we respect it

I think most people don't set $XDG_CONFIG_HOME if they are using the default $HOME/.config, but will still infer they are using it as it's part of their system.

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Passing on this, sorry

@MikeMcQuaid I'd like you to reconsider this.

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It's not just brew.env that uses this location, it's also used by HOMEBREW_LIVECHECK_WATCHLIST too.

.config/ is not widely used on macOS and we're primarily a macOS package manager.

Adding a separately default location for Linux for these two files only in cases where the user or the system doesn't set XDG_CONFIG_HOME makes the code and documentation unnecessarily complex.

If you care: set XDG_CONFIG_HOME. If you don't: just use our default locations.

Alternatively, convince every other project I use that uses a ~/.something e.g. RubyGems, rbenv, nodenv, npm, pyenv, Bash, ZSH, etc. to go use .config instead and, when they all do, we might too.

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