karlheg(a)cathcart.sysc.pdx.edu (Karl M. Hegbloom) writes: Yes, my mistake. Indeed. user-init-directory just needs to be constructed at run time. It is confusing that user-init-directory isn't the full path, but user-init-file is. Because at the time of the feature freeze there were still some problems with it and it was decided it needed more time to become stable and thus it was postponed. With hindsight that was probably a bad idea (we broke backwards compatibility anyway with the options menu). The main issue is not compatibility with FSF emacs. It is compatibility with older XEmacsen. That is important and that is why it is probably imperative to fall back on .emacs if that exists. The other issue is proper migration of the customize stuff. I have some ideas how to that. If you want to see this feature in 21.2 (I want it too) it is better to get it in as early as possible. However you need to give more though to migration issues before it can go in. Jan