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

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> > From: Noam Postavsky <npostavs@gmail.com>
> > Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2019 12:55:21 -0400
> > Cc: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>, Emacs developers <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> > 
> > > > > 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?

Amin, are you still working on this?  If so, do you have an updated
patch, which takes in account the review comments?  If not, can we
please get back to fixing this?

I'd like to fix the possible breakage that the original changeset
might cause.

TIA