GNU bug report logs - #8220
24.0.50; (On Windows XP) "c:\_emacs" isn't found during startup

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From: Jason Rumney <jasonr <at> gnu.org>
To: bug-gnu-emacs <at> gnu.org
Subject: bug#8220: 24.0.50; (On Windows XP) "c:\_emacs" isn't found during startup
Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2011 13:56:03 +0800

On 11/03/2011 10:35, Juanma Barranquero wrote:

> makes this less than clear-cut, and in fact, the order in which
> [._]emacs is searched (I'm ignoring ~/.emacs.d/init.el) is
>
>    %HOME%\.emacs
>    %HOME%\_emacs
>    C:\.emacs
>    %APPDATA%\.emacs
>    %APPDATA%\_emacs
>    

More accurately, if %HOME% is set explicitly, then init files are 
searched there.
Otherwise if c:\.emacs exists, then %HOME% is implicitly set to C:\ (for 
backwards compatibility with older versions)
Otherwise %HOME% is implicitly set to the user's Application Data 
directory, obtained through system calls.
(ignoring the fact that these system calls are not available on Windows 
95 and NT4 without IE5 or later installed, since such systems are 
unlikely to still exist).


> so there *is* an inconsistency. That said, _emacs is an obsolete name
> (on Windows, not MS-DOS), so it's not worth changing this IMO.
>    

This is the first bug report since the change was made in 22.1 (I 
think). And it appears the user is not encountering problems upgrading 
an older working installation but trying to set up a new installation, 
so I agree it is not important to fix this now.  In fact, we could start 
issuing a warning if the fallback directory of C:\ is detected as being 
used in Emacs 24, so we can remove this fallback in a future release.

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