emacs on windows with no drive c:

[Johann Höchtl]

To: bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
Subject: emacs on windows with no drive c:
--text follows this line--
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In GNU Emacs 21.1.1 (i386-msvc-nt5.1.2600)
 of 2001-10-22 on buffy
configured using `configure --with-msvc (12.00)'
Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: nil
  value of $LC_COLLATE: nil
  value of $LC_CTYPE: nil
  value of $LC_MESSAGES: nil
  value of $LC_MONETARY: nil
  value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil
  value of $LC_TIME: nil
  value of $LANG: C
  locale-coding-system: nil
  default-enable-multibyte-characters: t

Please describe exactly what actions triggered the bug
and the precise symptoms of the bug:

Dumb behaviour of emacs on Windows when you have no drive c:

(and explaination of it's behaviour)

Plattform: windows xp (possibly other versions too, can only confirm for xp)
Emacs version: 21.1 (possibly other versions too, only tested for 21.1.1)

Symptom:
---------

If you have no drive c: available for writting because it is missing 
(you have installed windows e.g. like me in the third partition because 
linux is just more important ;=) and so drive letters will start by e: ) 
and you have 'auto-save enabled, then emacs will stall and start to eat 
up your memory as soon as it attempts to write 
auto-save-list-file-prefix    which defaults to 
"~/.emacs.d/auto-save-list/.saves-"

The tilde defaults to the value of the environment variable HOME, which 
on most windows installations is unlikely to be set. In such case emacs 
asumes HOME to be "C:\" which is not available.


I think emacs should take the users home directory to write auto-save 
files (at least under nt, 2000 and xp). For those platforms it would be 
sane to default auto-save-list-file-prefix to
"%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%/.emacs.d/auto-save-list/.saves-"

Regards,
        Johann



Recent input:
<menu-bar> <help-menu> <report-emacs-bug>

Recent messages:
(C:\Programme\emacs-21.1\bin\emacs.exe)
For information about the GNU Project and its goals, type C-h C-p.
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