Rakudo Should Follow the XDG Base Directory Specification

[jeffgazso]

The Problem

Rakudo should not place dot files or directories directly in the root of $HOME unless specified. Doing so violates the XDG Base Directory Specification. Yes, I've seen the XKCD comic about standards... while not 100% universal, XDG adoption is widespread.

Expected Behavior

Rakudo should respect the XDG Base Directory Specification. Unless I'm misunderstanding the spec, Rakudo should most likely use $XDG_STATE_HOME/raku for this purpose with fallback to $HOME/.local/state/raku .

Actual Behavior

Currently Rakudo drops several things into $HOME/.raku. The directory is created the first time Rakduo is run and there is no way for the user to override this behavior. I was informed over IRC that this file system location is hard coded in CompUnit::RepositoryRegistry at line 174.

Steps to Reproduce

raku -e 'say "foo"' 

if [ -d "$HOME/.raku" ]; then echo "True"; fi # True

Environment

• Operating system: Linux.
• Compiler version (rakudo -v or raku -v):

raku -v
Welcome to Rakudo™ v2024.07.
Implementing the Raku® Programming Language v6.d.
Built on MoarVM version 2024.07.

Tangential to #2984.