bug#15539: Setting user-emacs-directory at command line invocation

[François Févotte]

Hi,

thanks for your comment.

On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 1:36 AM, Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org> wrote:
> I'm not saying it's the right solution, but you could use an environment
> variable (eg EMACS_USER_DIRECTORY) rather than a command-line switch to
> control this. This would be consistent with eg EMACSDATA, and also I
> think with how other applications normally let you control where they
> look for their init files (?). But on the other hand, environment
> variables can be easier to overlook than explicit flags eg when
> debugging.

Yes, you're right, this is a very good idea. I'll develop a new patch
for this as soon as I can.


> On the other other hand, the OP could just do
>
> ln -s mine.d .emacs.d
>
> so I'm not sure what the point of this feature would be, unless eg you
> frequently want to swap between different .emacs.d's?

I'm not sure about the OP's use case, but I can tell about mine: at
work, I try to maintain a sensible set of init files for my co-workers
to use (with the very outdated default version that we have installed
by default on our systems: 23.2). On the other hand, on my machine, I
maintain a locally-installed Emacs version that is more up-to-date. In
order to maintain both sets of init files, I need to be able to run
both versions of Emacs at the same time, which prevents me from
symlinking ~/.emacs.d/

There are reddit and stackexchange questions hinting at the same kind of use:

http://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/2y1b3a/how_can_i_easily_keep_different_emacsd_folders/
http://emacs.stackexchange.com/q/4253/221


Since these questions concern a broader audience, do you think that we
should add emacs-devel to this discussion?

Thanks,

François