Coddling emacs

[Laura Creighton]

Anders Hammarquist <iko at cd.chalmers.se> just returned from the
dangerous business of writing exams on the road to getting his
graduate degree in physics knows all about the wretched
.symbolic .links.

Turns out that emacs didn't use to do this.  It did this 
mangling in /usr/some-place-with-lots-of-slashes-in-them
which failed miserably when people started mounting /usr read only.
Oh sorrow, people said.  Whatever shall we do?  I know. Since
we don't have to lock files for writing when somebody is using
emacs to read a file mounted read only, we can dump this gorp
all over people's current working directory.  They are emacs
users ... they are used to this sort of abominable behaviour.
Then because we think gratuitous incompatable changes that
are in no way orthogonal to established ways of doing things
are exactly what everybody needs in the morning, we will make
sure that even though you can write a MUD in emacs, you can't
make an emacs macro to change this, because we didn't provide
the functionality.

However you can do this.  You must do this BEFORE emacs starts
running.  Put this in wherever you keep environment variables.
EMACSLOCKDIR=/tmp  (or whatever syntax keeps your shell happy).
Impress all the world that you, unlike the maintainers of
gnu emacs actually *know* how to find a directory that had
darn well better be writable or else not getting emacs to
lock properly will be the least of your problems.

Now you all know more than the maintainers of emacs and the
readers of comp.lang.lisp who were unable to answer this
question when I asked it there.

Laura