Re: how to force auto-save of buffers not visiting files, right now?

[hw]

On Sat, 2022-03-19 at 10:58 +0100, Michael Albinus wrote:
> hw <hw@adminart.net> writes:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> > For example, I may edit a file '/usr/local/bin/example.pl' which is
> > owned by foo:foo because I made that so.  The directory
> > '/usr/local/bin/' is owned by root.  How do you expect emacs to create
> > a backup file there?  For remote files, I have set
> > tramp-auto-save-directory to a local directory, and I'm missing an
> > equivalent option for local files.
> 
> There is the user option auto-save-file-name-transforms, which gives you
> this feature also for local files.

Thanks!

Its value is
(("\\`/[^/]*:\\([^/]*/\\)*\\([^/]*\\)\\'" "/tmp/\\2" t))

Ah, hm, what is that regexp supposed to match?  All files with at
least a ':', a bunch of slashes and some optional brackets?  Who puts
bracktes into file names, that shouldn't be allowed.

Apprently that leads to puttting some files into /tmp, and I would
consider it a bug to put auto-save files into /tmp because doing that
totally defeats the auto-saving because /tmp is volatile.  I don't
know who made the utterly stupid decision to make /tmp volatile, but
it's the way it is since quite a while now.  This default needs to be
changed, or /tmp needs to go back to be a useful directory.

Why didn't they just make a directory /volatile in addition to /tmp?
Because someone would argue that when something must not be saved,
then don't save it to begin with?

But then, the auto-save files for buffers not visiting files show up
in the directories the files are in from which the buffers not
visiting these files were created.

That is very confusing.