Stow should look in $STOW_DIR for .stowrc

[andrewbraxton]

I was a bit surprised to realize that running stow from somewhere outside of my $STOW_DIR did not respect the .stowrc in $STOW_DIR. The documentation does indicate that this is expected behavior:

Stow searches for default command line options at .stowrc (current directory) and ~/.stowrc (home directory) in that order.

I feel that $STOW_DIR should be added to this list, since my understanding the point of $STOW_DIR is to let you run stow from outside of your $STOW_DIR. Of course, you can use the ~/.stowrc location (which I will start doing), but IMO the natural place to place your .stowrc is in your $STOW_DIR since it's likely version-controlled.

(Bonus suggestion: Look in ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME} instead of $HOME for .stowrc)

[aspiers]

This sounds like a reasonable enhancement. There is one caveat in implementing this however: $STOW_DIR/.stowrc cannot be allowed to contain the -d / --dir options. There are two reasons for this:

1. Stow has no way to find the Stow directory unless it's told where it is, short of scanning the entire filesystem. So $STOW_DIR/.stowrc cannot be relied on for locating the Stow directory. (And BTW there can be multiple Stow directories on a system.)
2. It wouldn't make sense for $STOW_DIR/.stowrc to contain --dir /path/to/a/different/stow/dir as that would lead to very surprising behaviour.

With that caveat in mind, I'd definitely welcome a PR for this. The changes to get_config_file_options in stow.in should be extremely simple. The only slightly tricky thing would be adding relevant tests to t/rc_options.t.

Regarding the bonus suggestion, making Stow also check $XDG_CONFIG_HOME if defined sounds like a good idea. Although in that case it should still fall back to checking $HOME, otherwise if $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is defined but .stowrc is in $HOME, it will get ignored. A PR for this would be very welcome and even easier to make than a PR for above (perhaps both could be done at the same time, in fact).

[aspiers]

See also https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?67345