My typical workflow involves nuking ~/.cabal periodically. I do this so often that I developed a muscle memory for this command. Since this directory doesn’t exist anymore, does it mean that the new cabal will come with the cabal nuke or cabal gc command to collect garbage in the store?
The XDG-based directory sounds more like an internal implementation detail and shouldn’t leak to end user. I shouldn’t remember to type $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/cabal (and I don’t want to type this verbose command actually). I believe, there should at least be a command like cabal cache-dir that outputs the cache directory to stdout so I can at least do rm -rf $(cabal cache-dir).
Moreover, this change will break a lot of CI setups that cache global ~/.cabal storage. I’m using a GitHub Actions template that uses the output of the haskell/actions/setup. So my CI shouldn’t be affected (as long as GitHub action is patched). But I believe it would be great to reach out to more CI users with this update to help them to migrate to a newer setup.