Re: How to make emacs stop trying to load /home/sb/.emacs after su to root?

[Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no>]

>>>>> Perry Smith <pedz@easesoftware.com>:

> You said this is new behavior.  Are you sure of that? 

Compared to emacs 25 on debian 9.9, this is new behaviour.

I'm sure of this because I have a computer still debian 9.9 and mosh in
and /bin/su and then start emacs is something I do a lot, and I did that
in a different window at the same time as I had the issues on debian 10.

I don't think this is something the debian maintainers have changed.

(and no, it doesn't have anything to do with mosh. It works the same way
with SSH. I can't try on the console, because it's a VPS without a
console )

And the difference is more drastic than it would appear to be, because
emacs loads the .emacs file in my home directory, and then fails
miserably because that confif files expects a lot of emacs packages that
emacs is unable to find (ie. it does not use the packages under the
original user, ie. ~sb/.emacs.d/elpa/ ).

So... the resulting emacs starts up in a broken middle-of-configuration
state.  It does not have my own user's complete configuration.  And it
does not have user root's perfectly valid (but far less extensive)
configuration (it mainly configures stuff that annoys me, such as the
default of splitting windows vertically).

> The page your reference seems all perfectly normal way things work.

Actually it doesn't work (see the above paragraphs).

Of course I can *make* it work by typing "/bin/su - root" instead of
"/bin/su", but the need to do so... annoys me deeply.

> Last, in another email you said that if you “su - root”, then it is
> set to “”.  That seems weird too.  Is that before ~root/.emacs.el
> et. al. doesn’t exist?

I don't understand the question...?

~sb/.emacs exists
~root/.emacs also exists (but is far less extensive than ~sb/.emacs) 

(and they both exists both before and after emacs is started... have
existed for years, in fact...)