A completely fair point ... and one we debated at length.

Ultimately we decided that the convenience for users and documentation of a single location outweighed the benefits of following the basedir spec, particularly when deployed across operating systems. We looked at other tools, including terraform [1], in reaching a final decision. FWIW, we do let you customize the location of the "install dir" [2].

Hopefully the benefits of Steampipe outweigh the "peeve" factor in this case <grin>

1 - https://www.terraform.io/docs/cli/config/config-file.html 2 - https://steampipe.io/docs/reference/env-vars#steampipe_insta...

Sadly I read that as "Other tools do their own thing so we decided to do our own thing too" :(

Though admittedly, "convenience for users" is a rather tricky thing to define, as you really need to define "which users". I imagine ~/.projectname is easier getting started out, but the long term management is why we (try) to have standard locations for things.

Agreed. Unfortunately requirements for long term management / large scale deployment aren't a priority until a tool is widely adopted, which is best achieved by keeping it simple. An interesting trade off...

All the more reason to handle it sooner when its less painful to do the right thing.