RE: .emacs-settings.el

[Drew Adams]

I haven't followed this thread closely. Could someone please summarize the
need for which the solutions are being discussed?

If this is about users defining their preferred settings for something, and
you want such settings to be persistent, then why not use Customize instead
of adding separate preference files?

IIUC, the separate preference files proposed would control stuff in the
directories (or perhaps in the child or parent directories?) where they are
found. If so, wouldn't it be appropriate to do all of that using a single
user option that specified the directories and the preferences for the files
in those directories?

Or is the problem that these preference files are supposed to affect
multiple users, so that they cannot be in a single user's preference file?

Sorry for not following this, but I suspect others too might have lost the
thread of this thread. A brief summary of the need could help us understand
better.

If this is about a need to share preferences among multiple users, then
perhaps we could have an "import" or "include" feature for Customize that
allows sharing of some preferences. Importing would reference the imported
custom files, rather than making explicit copies of their data, so that
changes to the imported file would be reflected in the importing files.
(Perhaps this possibility of sharing preferences has been discussed before?)