Subject: bug#10980: GNU bugs information: logs for bug#10980

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2016 17:57:30 +0300

> From: Noam Postavsky <[email-masked]>
> Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2016 22:54:25 -0400
> Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked]
> 
> On Tue, Jun 21, 2016 at 10:39 PM, Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> wrote:
> >> From: Noam Postavsky <[email-masked]>
> >> Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2016 17:03:21 -0400
> >> Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked]
> >>
> >> I feel like I'm missing some important point here. If these
> >> environment variables won't affect subprocess environments, why set
> >> them at all?
> >
> > Because Emacs itself needs them.  They must be in Emacs's environment,
> > but don't have to be in Vprocess_environment.
> 
> What does it need them for?

Various features in Emacs rely on them to be present and valid
(because that's what happens on Posix systems).

> Just because Emacs consults the values from its environment?

Yes.

> Is there some reason not to use just plain old global variables?

On all platforms, or just on Windows?

In any case, doing that would mean a much larger job, even if it's
possible.  E.g., how do you deal with Lisp code that expects
(expand-file-name "~") and (getenv "HOME") to yield the same value?