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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Noam Postavsky <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2019 12:55:21 -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.

Maybe use an environment variable only to override the default
preference order between XDG and ~/.emacs.d, i.e. as that "fire
escape" I had in mind?