Re: Use .emacs.d in savehist.el

[Chong Yidong]

>> I looked into the possibility of making Miles' "find customization
>> file" function do a chown and chgrp on the customization file, so that
>> this problem won't arise.  But Emacs doesn't have any built-in chown
>> or chgrp.  Dired can do it, but it's by calling an external program.
>
> I tend to think that people who use "emacs -u foo" as root just get what
> they deserve.

In that case, maybe using root's own .emacs.d is actually the safer
thing to do, even if it is inconsistent with the meaning of "-u foo".

Here are two possibilities I can think of:

1. Let `init-file-user' apply to the init file only.  The init file
   has enough complications anyway that Miles' proposed function won't
   do the trick (apart from `init-file-user', there is the MS-DOS
   "_emacs" issue).  That function can be implemented so other
   libraries can use it, but it ignores init-file-user.

2. Go through the code in such a way that when init-file-user is
   non-nil, files are *read* from ~INIT_FILE_USER/.emacs.d, but
   *written* to the user's own home directory.  This can be made
   simpler by implementing Miles' function with an optional
   `read-only' argument, but we will still have to go through all the
   places that currently use .emacs.d to make sure they DTRT.

Personally, I like the first possibility because it's much
simpler... no one has actually complained about the interaction
between .emacs.d and init-file-user (at least until I brought it up
:-P), so I think it's not a big enough problem to justify a
far-reaching fix, especially close to release.