Module paths 

Path resolution for dodot.

Pather is dodot’s single source of truth for every filesystem coordinate the rest of the codebase touches: $HOME, the dotfiles repo root, the XDG data/config/cache directories, and per-pack and per-handler subdirectories. Two reasons it’s a trait, not free functions:

1. Testability. Constructing a Pather whose roots all live under a tempfile::TempDir lets every command run end-to-end against a real filesystem without ever touching the user’s actual $HOME. The testing::TempEnvironment builder does exactly this.

2. Centralisation of OS-shaped policy. The XDG fallback chain, the DOTFILES_ROOT env-var lookup, and (planned, per docs/proposals/macos-paths.lex) the macOS app_support_dir selection all live in one place. The resolver, the symlink handler, and adopt’s source-path inference all consult the same accessors — drift between them is impossible by construction.

Adopt source-root invariants

The inference function in commands::adopt::infer needs stable root strings it can prefix-match against canonicalised source paths. The accessors exposed here meet two requirements that make that work safely:

• home_dir() and xdg_config_home() return paths that std::fs::canonicalize resolves to themselves on a real filesystem (they’re real directories, not synthetic constants). This is what makes the /var ↔ /private/var macOS equivalence collapse cleanly when both a source and a root are canonicalised before comparison.

• On the default config (no XDG_CONFIG_HOME set), xdg_config_home() is home_dir().join(".config") — i.e. nested under $HOME. Inference must check the more-specific (XDG) root before HOME so ~/.config/nvim/init.lua matches XDG, not “nested under HOME”. That’s enforced by the inference function, not by Pather, but the nesting shape originates here.

Structs

XdgPather

XDG-compliant path resolver.

XdgPatherBuilder

Builder for XdgPather.

Traits

Pather

Provides all path calculations for dodot.