[jidanni@jidanni.org: just try once to create ~/.emacs.d]

[jidanni@jidanni.org: just try once to create ~/.emacs.d]

[Richard Stallman]

Would someone please DTRT and ack?

------- Start of forwarded message -------
From: Dan Jacobson <jidanni@jidanni.org>
To: bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
Date: Sun, 26 Feb 2006 07:25:37 +0800
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Subject: just try once to create ~/.emacs.d

One day try
# su - nobody
$ emacs
You'll get these messages, more than one a minute:
  make-directory: Creating directory: permission denied, //.emacs.d
OK, but how about have it just try once, else "frequent visual bells
may send some users into epileptic seizures, and who's going to pay
for that?"


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------- End of forwarded message -------

Re: [jidanni@jidanni.org: just try once to create ~/.emacs.d]

[Chong Yidong]

> One day try
> # su - nobody
> $ emacs
> You'll get these messages, more than one a minute:
>   make-directory: Creating directory: permission denied, //.emacs.d
> OK, but how about have it just try once, else "frequent visual bells
> may send some users into epileptic seizures, and who's going to pay
> for that?"

Can you reproduce it with emacs -q?  I can't.  Could you try to figure
out what Lisp code is trying to make .emacs.d, or at least give a more
precise recipe for reproducing the bug (starting from emacs -q)?

Re: [jidanni@jidanni.org: just try once to create ~/.emacs.d]

[Richard Stallman]

    > One day try
    > # su - nobody
    > $ emacs
    > You'll get these messages, more than one a minute:
    >   make-directory: Creating directory: permission denied, //.emacs.d
    > OK, but how about have it just try once, else "frequent visual bells
    > may send some users into epileptic seizures, and who's going to pay
    > for that?"

    Can you reproduce it with emacs -q?

This could, conceivably, be due to code that depends directly on a
non-nil init-file-user, even if his init file is empty.

Re: [jidanni@jidanni.org: just try once to create ~/.emacs.d]

[Dan Jacobson]

Odd, sometimes I can reproduce this, minutes later I can't.
today. But user nobody should have no way to write things to change
the state of the system, except in /tmp. And ii didn't write there.
emacs -q didn't reproduce it, but then -q or not, sometime didn't
reproduce it.  Anyway, it takes about a minute to show up, ^X^B will
show the *Messages* buffer grown.  -q shouldn't matter as ~/nobody has
no .emacs as it is /.

$ strings /usr/bin/emacs21-x shows
~/_emacs.d/auto-save.list/_s
~/.emacs.d/auto-save-list/.saves-

$ apt-cache policy emacs21
  Installed: 21.4a-3

Re: [jidanni@jidanni.org: just try once to create ~/.emacs.d]

[Chong Yidong]

Dan Jacobson <jidanni@jidanni.org> writes:

> Odd, sometimes I can reproduce this, minutes later I can't.
> today. But user nobody should have no way to write things to change
> the state of the system, except in /tmp. And ii didn't write there.
> emacs -q didn't reproduce it, but then -q or not, sometime didn't
> reproduce it.  Anyway, it takes about a minute to show up, ^X^B will
> show the *Messages* buffer grown.

Could you try to figure out what Lisp code is trying to save to
.emacs, e.g., by setting debug-on-error to t.

Re: [jidanni@jidanni.org: just try once to create ~/.emacs.d]

[Sven Joachim]

[My apologies if the message references in the header are not right;
  I read emacs-devel in digest mode.]

Dan Jacobson wrote:

> Odd, sometimes I can reproduce this, minutes later I can't.
> today. But user nobody should have no way to write things to change
> the state of the system, except in /tmp. And ii didn't write there.
> emacs -q didn't reproduce it, but then -q or not, sometime didn't
> reproduce it.  Anyway, it takes about a minute to show up, ^X^B will
> show the *Messages* buffer grown.  -q shouldn't matter as ~/nobody has
> no .emacs as it is /.

I tried to reproduce your problem with both Emacs 21 and Emacs CVS.
It seems that the error message is triggered when Emacs tries to
auto-save.  Enabling debug-on-error gives the backtrace

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (file-error "Creating directory" "permission denied" "//.emacs.d")
   make-directory-internal("//.emacs.d")
   make-directory("//.emacs.d/auto-save-list/" t)

when typing "M-x do-auto-save".  The good news is that it happened only
under Emacs 21, but not in the current development version which will
hopefully be released this year.