Use a .cake folder by default instead of a tools folder (?)

[augustoproiete]

Idea/suggestion for a future version of Cake:

As we all know, Cake uses a folder for downloading and extracting NuGet packages (and other things), and by default it uses a ./tools folder.

There a couple of (small) issues I've seen because of that:

1. Adding Cake to existing projects (any language/platform)
   ./tools is a common enough name that some projects use for other purposes (even internal to the project) and when introducing Cake to existing projects that already define a ./tools folder, one needs to be careful to ensure Cake won't touch that folder and will use a different folder instead, which is not as straightforward as changing the cake.config as sometimes that means adapting bootstrappers that don't honor what's set in the cake.config.

2. Adding Cake to new projects (.NET-specific)
   When starting a new project, it's common for devs to use the default VisualStudio.gitignore on GitHub. The good news is that this .gitignore already brings a couple of lines specific to Cake. The bad news is that they are commented out, because having a ./tools by default would be too broad of a rule.

If Cake started using a .cake folder (or similar), it would avoid the issues above as it's unlikely users would have a .cake folder for a different purpose other than using Cake, and it would be specific enough to be included in the VisualStudio.gitignore template.

Thoughts?

[pascalberger]

We have an open issue for using global packages folder (#2830) which I think would solve the mentioned points

[augustoproiete]

Does that completely eliminate the need for Cake having a "work" folder that is local to the project?

[pascalberger]

There are a few difficult things to solve like tool and module resolving. If this could be solved all NuGet packages are out. Leaving only bootstrapper specific files (packages.config, nuget.exe) in there which are not strictly required.

[augustoproiete]

Given this seems to be something for the v2.0.0 timeframe, wouldn't it be worth (as an intermediary step) to:

• Update the cake.config template to use ./.cake instead ./tools
• Update the .NET Framework bootstrapper templates to use ./.cake instead ./tools

?

[pascalberger]

We don't want to make this change in the 1.x timeframe since it probably will break more people than it benefits. It's also not done with updating just these two files, since the new defaults would need to be propagated through the whole ecosystem.

2.0 will be the release where we can think about making changes like this (and we don't expect 2.0 to take another 6 years 😉)

[RehanSaeed]

I came here to make this exact suggestion. Props to @augustoproiete, you got here first!

[augustoproiete]

Tracking via #3263 scheduled for Cake v2.0 Cake v3.0