Re: USER-INIT-DIRECTORY and all that jazz
Hrvoje Niksic writes:
sperber(a)informatik.uni-tuebingen.de (Michael Sperber [Mr.
Preprocessor]) writes:
> I conclude from this that `init-file-user' is really too arcane to
> matter. The logic behind it is too twisted for me to really grok,
> and therefore probably to most users and many developers.
I think I agree with this. I wonder what the rationale for
introducing `init-file-user' must have looked like. Like, "Wouldn't
it really be cool to have a variable that makes me pretend that I'm
another user, because I'm too lazy to cp his .emacs over to my home
dir and I can't be bothered to manually specify a different startup
file/directory?"
More likely it was added for sites with multiple people using the
superuser account (or some similar shared account) who all wanted to
edit files with their own Emacs environment. The user doesn't have
to understand anything complicated--- just "emacs -u somebodyelse".
I doubt that anyone sets init-file-user directly. But if you smoke
init-file-user and the support code, I don't see how "emacs -u" is going
to keep working.
And I think it should keep working. Forget about the elaborate
user who loads a bazillion packages from his private stash of
bleeding edge Lisp. Think about the simple frood using a shared
account who just wants her customization variables set and her
＠#&$*^ key bindings loaded. THAT still works, but it won't if we
smoke "emacs -u".