Subject: bug#79124: emacs -Q doesn't give me a clean slate

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2025 13:48:28 -0700

On 2025-08-05 12:19, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> These files are not "home directory", they just live there.

Because they live in the home directory, they're subject to all the 
problems that any home-directory files can have, and those are problems 
that -Q (or -QQ if you prefer) are supposed to work around. It doesn't 
matter whether the files were last modified by Emacs or by some other 
program.

>> In most setups, installation files are readonly and set up by a
>> trusted user, whereas the home directory is not.
> 
> We are talking about users, such as yourself, who run such tests.
> Those users are most probably building and installing their own Emacs.

No, I respond to bug reports (mostly not on this forum) from people who 
typically are not building and installing their own Emacs. They're 
running an Emacs that the system made available to them.

> The files can be corrupted in any place, not only in the home
> directory.  Why do you trust the installed files to not be corrupt?

Because the installed files are read-only, the user can't modify them, 
and so they are as trustworthy as the rest of the distro. This is 
standard practice on GNU/Linux and similar systems.

I continue to be puzzled by the idea that -Q should read from 
$HOME/.emacs.d. If there's a reason for that behavior, we should add a 
flag -QQ that avoids reading from $HOME during startup. This would be a 
real win for a common use case, and it wouldn't hurt other uses.