Re: setenv

[Richard Stallman]

    >  3) Making any emacs primitives that call such `environment grokking'
    >     library functions propagate any related enviroment variables from
    >     `process-environment' into the real environment when needed.  This
    >     requires the affected primitives to know when such action is needed,
    >     but this is no more burden than that of option (2), and it has the
    >     big advantage of putting the onus on the emacs developers rather
    >     than on the users!
    > 
    > As you can see, I like option (3).

    Unfortunately, option 3 depends on intimate knowledge of the library
    internals, and might mean you will need ugly system-dependent code
    that potentially needs to be changed when new versions of the
    libraries are released on each system.

In theory, we would need intimate knowledge.  In practice, I think we
don't.  There are just a few parts of Emacs that do anything so
complex it might fork a process without Emacs's knowledge.

And it would never hurt to add a few extra calls to the function
that updates the C-level environment, whenever there is doubt.
We don't need to get this "exactly right".