Re: visiting "~/Application Data" gets "~" instead

[Jason Rumney]

address@hidden wrote:
> This doesn't explain why (find-file-noselect "~/") and
> (find-file-noselect "~/Application Data/") return the same buffer.
> Shouldn't they be differnet no matter what ~ expands to?
>   
find-file-noselect calls (abbreviate-file-name (expand-file-name FILE)), 
where expand-file-name is implemented in C and uses egetenv("HOME") to 
expand "~", while abbreviate-file-name compares against lisp variable 
abbreviated-home-dir, so if HOME is changed from inside Emacs, these two 
functions are not going to be consistent with each other. This doesn't 
explain the above by itself, but I'm sure if you dived deeper you would 
find the explanation.

The question is - is this worth fixing? Is it reasonable for the user to 
change the environment variable HOME from within Emacs?