Recommend the home crate in env::home_dir()'s deprecation

[utkarshgupta137]

The home is now maintained by the cargo & rustup teams, so it seems like a no-brainer to recommend it in the standard library.

See also: #71684 (comment).

Closes #71684.

@rustbot label +T-libs-api -T-lib

r? @joshtriplett
r? @Dylan-DPC

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[tgross35]

I don't think that rust typically likes endorsing third-party crates, but maybe it's OK here. reread the discussion, yeah this is wanted.

Could you update the deprecation section in the docs to say this same thing?

@rustbot label -T-libs +A-docs

[ChrisDenton]

Personally i don't think that the crate being taken under cargo's wing should be construed to imply endorsement. Indeed part of the reason for doing so was that "the crate seems somewhat specific to cargo and rustup".

Linking to external crates in the std docs is very unusual nowadays so I think it warrants an fcp.

[bors]

☔ The latest upstream changes (presumably #113777) made this pull request unmergeable. Please resolve the merge conflicts.

[tgross35]

This should be rebased onto the latest master before merge fyi

[joshtriplett]

Can I get a second opinion from @rust-lang/cargo here? My read is that the home crate, despite the generic name, is fairly Cargo-specific and not what we want to point most people to.

[weihanglo]

Agree with @joshtriplett. See also a recent issue rust-lang/cargo#12297.

[workingjubilee]

I'm afraid that means we should probably reject this PR.

[utkarshgupta137]

I think it is fair to say that even though the home crate is fairly rustup & cargo specific, it is being used by a lot of major packages: https://crates.io/crates/home/reverse_dependencies
I think the discussion in the linked issue came to the same conclusion. Would it be better to change the wording from a recommendation to a suggestion instead?

[workingjubilee]

The conclusion in that issue, as I read it, is that there should be an ACP for a new version of the deprecated function.

[tgross35]

With the above in mind, dirs may be better to recommend than home if anything, since it follows XDG. And is more popular than home

[utkarshgupta137]

With the above in mind, dirs may be better to recommend than home if anything, since it follows XDG. And is more popular than home

I think the dirs crate does much more than this 1 function. AFAIK, the XDG spec doesn't say anything about the home directory, but if that is a consideration, then I don't think dirs is the right choice, since it doesn't allow you to follow XDG spec on other platforms, which is very popular on macOS: dirs-dev/directories-rs#47.
If it is important to link to a crate that supports XDG, I'd like to propose etcetera instead (which is maintained by me), which supports XDG on all platforms. But it indirectly uses the home crate, so I don't really see the point.

[workingjubilee]

...The fact that there is any discussion at all on this PR about what crate to use suggests strongly that this case is not so open-and-shut as to recommend simply picking a crate.

[Dylan-DPC]

Closing this as there are concerns with this pr , and this probably needs an ACP first