Subject: Re: bug#12908: 24.3.50; file `emacs_backtrace.txt'?

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2012 11:29:47 -0800

On 11/17/2012 11:09 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> That suitable place is in a subdirectory of the user's home directory,
> at least on the most popular systems, according to the Emacs manual.

Sure, but it's under the user's control, and it's easy to
change the default.  I'm not a typical user, but I'd guess
that about half the time I put stderr some place other
than the default, because I start up Emacs from a terminal
session or suchlike.  And when Emacs is being debugged, stderr
is almost never put into a home-directory file.

> unlike Unix, a GUI program invoked on Windows
> from a desktop icon normally has its standard error stream closed.

This is a problem not just for backtraces, but for everything that
Emacs sends to stderr.  Perhaps it would be better for Emacs, on
Microsoft Windows, to redirect stderr to a file, so that the information
does not get lost.  That file would serve the function that
emacs_backtrace.txt serves now, but it would also capture all the
other stuff that goes to stderr and currently gets lost.

Even if we continue to restrict the contents of the file to
backtraces, the name of this file is something that is specific
to the Microsoft Windows version of Emacs, so the GNU and Unix versions
don't have to worry about the file's name.

> (Note that unlike on Unix, Emacs on Windows doesn't change its current
> directory from where it was started

No, Emacs is the same on both platforms.  The main Emacs process doesn't
invoke chdir on GNU or Unix either, unless you use the --chdir option.