of course if there is a chance that some specific config file exists at a known location, it’s the only sane choice to try and look for it there iff it isn’t in its preferred location.

e.g. fontconfig made that switch some time ago: it used to be ~/.fonts.conf, now it’s ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME-$HOME/.config}/fontconfig/fonts.conf

the library will look at the new position and if it can’t find anything there, it looks at the old one.

but for new config files we should follow standards. on windows and OSX there are different ones: see the current discussion on python-ideas for specifics and problems. but on linux the only standard for this which i know is XDG-base-directories, so we should follow that for new config files.