Re: [PATCH] Implement XDG Base Directory specification for user-emacs-directory

[Noam Postavsky]

On Mon, 10 Jun 2019 at 12:22, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > From: Noam Postavsky <address@hidden>
> > Date: Sun, 9 Jun 2019 16:16:22 -0400
> > Cc: Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>, Emacs developers <address@hidden>
> >
> > > I agree, but maybe we should also have an opt-in defcustom to prefer
> > > the other way around.  IME, sometimes ~/.emacs.d is created due to
> > > some random experiments people do, which are unrelated to their
> > > routine operations, or due to some (buggy) packages that hard-code
> > > ~/.emacs.d.  We should give such users a fire escape.
> >
> > But where would the defcustom setting be read from? Seems like a bit
> > of a bootstrapping problem.
>
> You are right, but then I think this feature will be an endless
> source of confusion and bug reports.  Sigh...

Perhaps we could revisit Bug#15539 which allows setting
user-emacs-directory via EMACS_USER_DIRECTORY environment variable? It
was marked as wontfix, mainly (as far as I can tell) based on the
potential bugs that letting user-emacs-directory be different than
$HOME/.emacs.d could bring, but it looks like we've basically decided
that is acceptable here anyway.

https://debbugs.gnu.org/15539