GNU bug report logs - #12911
24.3.50; let users decide where (& perhaps whether) `emacs_backtrace.txt' files are written

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From: "Drew Adams" <drew.adams <at> oracle.com>
To: "'Eli Zaretskii'" <eliz <at> gnu.org>, "'Daniel Colascione'" <dancol <at> dancol.org>
Cc: 12911 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#12911: 24.3.50; let users decide where (& perhaps whether)`emacs_backtrace.txt'	files are written
Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2012 10:57:00 -0800

> Yet another candidate is "My Documents" (e.g., bzr uses
> it).  But none of them is really for the user, according to Windows
> guidelines.

Really?  I don't know (or care too much) what Windows guidelines might say about
this.  But I would be mildly curious about that, if you happen to have a URL.

Everyone I know considers `My Documents' and its subfolders to be a user folder
- maybe even *THE* user folder par excellence.

There is even a `My Documents' folder for each user defined for the machine.
(Another name for it can be Administrator's Documents, Drew's Documents, Eli's
Documents. etc.)  Pretty clear to me that this intended to separate one users
documents from those of another user, as well as from non-user documents.

Why any program (e.g. bzr, apparently) would want to consider that folder as
fair game for stuffing its internal stuff is beyond me.  How impolite.

Anyway, let's see what good ol' Wikipedia has to say...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Documents

 My Documents is the name of a special folder on the computer's
 hard drive that the system commonly uses to store a user's
 documents, music, pictures, downloads, and other files.

Whaddya know?  And it says `My Documents' was introduced, "as a standard
location for storing user-created files."

Hm.  That all sounds just like what I think about it.  And about its subfolders,
including `My Music',...  That "My" should tell us something, I would think.

`My Documents' is not the kind of place a civilized program would want to
pollute with its own crap.

Now of course, installing a program might well create a subfolder under `My
Documents' that is intended for user-created data that is specific to that
program - e.g. music files you save.  Nothing wrong with that.

That is not the same as a place to stuff program-internal data.  We have
`Program Files' and user-specific `Local Settings\Application Data' for that
kind of thing.

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