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

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 04 Aug 2025 21:14:08 +0300

> Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2025 10:19:12 -0700
> Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked]
> From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
> 
> > I thought, perhaps mistakenly, that you
> > wanted to prevent Emacs from accessing the home directory when that
> > directory did exist
> 
> No, I just want Emacs to skip the user-specific configuration it 
> normally does, so that I'm running a vanilla Emacs rather than a 
> tailored Emacs.

Then accessing the eln-cache is not an issue for you, and we should
just stop wasting each other's time.  As I'm quite sure I said in my
original response to your bug report.  Because none of the *.eln files
are user-specific configuration, precisely like the *.elc files on the
user's machine aren't.

> The original intent of -Q was to have a convenient way to have Emacs run 
> independently of user-specific configuration. If -Q has strayed away 
> from that intent but we can't change its behavior for some backward 
> compatibility concern, then we should have a new short option to do the 
> original intent.

Then let's return to talking about the real problems: the loading of
abbrevs and perhaps the auto-save-list files (not sure that the latter
match the description of "user-specific configuration").  The rest of
the accesses to the home directory are to load and/or write *.eln
files, and have nothing to do with user configuration.