Re: Inexplicable flaw: non-overridable .emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: kj <socyl@987jk.com.invalid>
> Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 18:15:15 +0000 (UTC)
> 
> Please correct me if I'm wrong, it is my understanding that one
> cannot use a command-line switch to tell emacs to read a config
> file *other* than the standard ~/.emacs.

You are only partly wrong: Emacs has a --load command-line switch that
would load any file you name.  But such loading is not 100% equivalent
to how Emacs loads a .emacs file, because .emacs is read at a certain
point during the Emacs session startup, while files given via --load
are read at a different point.  So the effects could be subtly
different, especially with respect to display setup.

> If this is correct, I seems to me an inexplicable design flaw.  Is
> there some fundamental reason for it?

Unix programs that support .something initialization files all have
this behavior: they read the init file of the current user.  Emacs
just behaves like Unix users expect it to.

Could you please tell why you don't want to have a .emacs file?