GNU bug report logs - #16087
Setting HOME environment variable in Emacs on Windows has side effects

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From: SDS <sds.biz.main <at> gmail.com>
To: eliz <at> gnu.org
Cc: 16087 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#16087: Re: bug#16087: Setting HOME environment variable in Emacs on Windows has side effects
Date: Sun, 08 Dec 2013 14:44:55 -0500

On 12/8/2013 12:38 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> OTOH, the use case for supporting such a strange change in the middle
> of an Emacs session is entirely not clear to me.  On the contrary, it
> seems to me like doing this is asking for a lot of trouble, and not
> only in Emacs (because 'setenv' modifies process-environment, so every
> subprocess will get this new value of HOME, so, e.g., the shell will
> not find its init files). Could you please describe why you needed
> this?

On Windows, I have two versions of Emacs running: a Cygwin port 
(Emacs-w32) and a GNU port (NT-Emacs). I was originally using Emacs-w32 
because it supports some Cygwin utilities that aren't supported by 
NT-Emacs (e.g. Cygwin bash, Cygwin OpenSSH). However, Cygwin's port was 
aborting frequently. The Cygwin Emacs maintainer said it was another 
application interfering, but I had removed all that I had installed from 
their list of such applications (BLODA) and it hadn't fixed the 
aborting. I didn't have the time to debug the issue any further, so I 
decided to switch workflow to NT-Emacs until I could fix Emacs-w32.

At the moment, I have two separate .emacs.d directories for each of the 
two ports. I didn't want to use a single .emacs.d directory for both 
ports because I'm not sure if they would play nicely with each other. I 
also don't want issues with one to be carried over to the other. So I 
have my HKCU\SOFTWARE\GNU\Emacs\HOME registry key pointing to a 
directory with the .emacs.d for NT-Emacs, while my .emacs.d for 
Emacs-w32 is in my Cygwin HOME directory.

Ultimately, I'd like my HOME variable in NT-Emacs to point to the Cygwin 
HOME directory. This allows any Cygwin utilities used by NT-Emacs to 
have HOME set correctly. Also, I'd like ~ to be set to the Cygwin HOME 
directory. I tried changing it in init.el, and that's where this issue 
arose.


Cheers,

SDS

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