Re: setenv

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Miles Bader <miles@lsi.nec.co.jp>
> Date: 21 Sep 2001 10:00:58 +0900
> 
>  1) Have every call to elisp's `setenv' update the real environment as
>     well as `process-environment'; this seems not good because we want
>     calls to `setenv' to be no different than simply modifying the
>     variable `process-environment'.

I don't understand the last sentence.  Can you explain?

FWIW, I think this option is the best one, unless there are good
reasons that Emacs wants to keep the process-environment's values
separate.

>  3) Making any emacs primitives that call such `environment grokking'
>     library functions propagate any related enviroment variables from
>     `process-environment' into the real environment when needed.  This
>     requires the affected primitives to know when such action is needed,
>     but this is no more burden than that of option (2), and it has the
>     big advantage of putting the onus on the emacs developers rather
>     than on the users!
> 
> As you can see, I like option (3).

Unfortunately, option 3 depends on intimate knowledge of the library
internals, and might mean you will need ugly system-dependent code
that potentially needs to be changed when new versions of the
libraries are released on each system.  I think we'd like to avoid
that.