Having further pondered this issue, I came to the conclusion that there really isn't any ideal solution for addressing the file clobbering risk; regardless of what output directory is configured, the risk exists.
Besides, as already pointed out by several people, $HOME is pretty much the only sensible output directory, from a usability perspective. As such, I have tagged this bug as "won't fix". -- Martin-Éric Racine http://q-funk.iki.fi
