I just finished tracking down a bug that had resulted from my .emacs.desktop file oddly snapshotting all of my environment variables and then restoring them from that frozen state each time I reloaded that desktop file.

Environment variables are not saved by default when I run desktop-save from a freshly invoked emacs -q instance.

Not sure what condition in my init.el is triggering emacs to save that type of info in my .emacs.desktop, but since environment variables can easily change external to emacs, restoring stale versions of these variables can introduce subtle bugs that are difficult to track down.

It's also not clear from the documentation how to modify this feature:

https://emacsdocs.org/docs/emacs/Saving-Emacs-Sessions

The variable desktop-globals-to-clear looked promising, but unfortunately I don't think it will help here.

So how can users exercise better control over what type of state information gets saved in their .emacs.desktop files?

* emacsusr <opngid@gmail.com>
| I just finished tracking down a bug that had resulted from my
| .emacs.desktop file oddly snapshotting all of my environment variables
| and then restoring them from that frozen state each time I reloaded
| that desktop file.
>
| Environment variables are not saved by default when I run desktop-save
| from a freshly invoked emacs -q instance.

There is also no mention of 'env' in desktop.el (emacs 27.2 here).
Maybe some hook which jumps in here?

I'd check where the section with that information in .emacs.desktop gets
written in the code of 'desktop-save'. Then maybe you get a clue which
part of desktop.el is the culprit.

Good luck!
R'

> I'd check where the section with that information in .emacs.desktop gets
> written in the code of 'desktop-save'. Then maybe you get a clue which
> part of desktop.el is the culprit.
>
> Good luck!
> R'

Thanks. I just checked

http://doc.endlessparentheses.com/Var/desktop-globals-to-save.html

to no avail.