Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: "Basil L. Contovounesios" <contovob@tcd.ie>
>> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,  47790@debbugs.gnu.org
>> Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2021 13:12:29 +0100
>> 
>> IME when someone says "set FOO to $HOME/.foo" without any further
>> qualification they are implicitly referring to the expansion of
>> $HOME.
>
> That's what I knew, but Thierry seems to say otherwise.

Well, it is common to set PATH like this:

PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"

you find this in ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc on many distros.
I didn't find documentaion about this though.
Anyway the problem is if one do this with XDG_DATA_HOME and trash files
from different directories, a copy of his home directory will be done in
each of those directories under literally "$HOME/user".
If you consider this is fine and normal you can close this bug report.

Thanks.

-- 
Thierry