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#79124
emacs -Q doesn't give me a clean slate
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Message #80 received at 79124 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):
On 2025-08-04 05:22, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> if setting HOME to a non-existent directory gives you what you want
It doesn't, for several reasons.
* Emacs outputs spurious diagnostics. It shouldn't.
* It's a pain to communicate with other users when diagnosing. I should
be able to tell them "run emacs -QQ". But currently I have to tell them
something like "get a copy of the Emacs source, run './configure
--prefix=$HOME/prefix --with-native-compilation=aot', run 'make install'
(this may a long time; be patient), set HOME to a nonexistent directory
whose parent directory is unwritable, then run $HOME/prefix/bin/emacs -Q
except use the old HOME not the new one and make sure you are not a
superuser, and ignore the following worrisome-looking diagnostics". If
they make a single mistake (say, they run as root) the whole thing falls
apart. This is so awkward and unfriendly that I won't even bother.
* When using Emacs in this way, I can't edit my own files conveniently.
I have to use tell Emacs a name like "~eggert/foo" where I should be
able to say just "~/foo".
There are probably other reasons, these are just off the top of my head.
> I'm talking about much more subtle issues, like the need to compile
> trampolines required in some cases.
Although I don't know what those subtle issues are, I don't see what
they have to do with accessing $HOME when Emacs starts up. If Emacs
needs to read files under $HOME to compile trampolines (why?) and $HOME
is off-limits, it can access files in /tmp like other programs do.
> 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. This helps make tests more reproducible. I don't want to
prevent all accesses to my home directory.
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.
This bug report was last modified 3 days ago.
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