Subject: bug#12911: 24.3.50; let users decide where (& perhaps whether) `emacs_backtrace.txt' files are written

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 18 Nov 2012 19:53:35 +0200

> From: "Drew Adams" <[email-masked]>
> Cc: <[email-masked]>, <[email-masked]>
> Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2012 20:40:08 -0800
> 
> I don't care what Emacs does on Unix or on Windows.

Well, I do.  Which is why I'm working on developing and maintaining
Emacs.  And if you think that declaring your indifference to the
cross-platform compatibility of Emacs raises the value of your
arguments in my eyes, then I suggest that you reconsider.

>  my concern is at the user level.  Please don't mess with user data.  That's
> not nice.  And this includes user folders containing user files.

Any folder on Windows can contain user data, because most Windows
users are usually local administrators and have almost unlimited
privileges (except perhaps on corporate servers).  In fact, Windows
doesn't even have a firm notion of a home directory.  There are
guidelines where _applications_ should put their files, but nothing
about what is "home" for the user, where the user should keep her
precious lasagna recipes.  We (Emacs) pick up one or 2 plausible
locations and pretend they are that "home", but they aren't, as far as
the OS and the rest of applications are concerned.  They are just more
or less random directories.

> The first rule should be not to do any harm.

You are making a mount out of a molehill.  There is no harm.
Well-behaving applications write to all kinds of directories all the
time, including user home directories.  Bash writes ~/.bash_history,
Bazaar writes ~/.bzr.log, Eshell writes ~/.eshell/*.  Etc. etc. --
this is the norm, not the exception.  Emacs behaves according to
well-established norms.

I agree that putting that file in ~/.emacs.d/ (also in the home a
directory, so maybe you will still protest) is slightly better.  But
if Emacs should do that, it should do it on all the supported
platforms.  I'm sorry, but unless this is what's agreed soon, I _will_
close this bug.