[yocto] Strangeness with devshell

[Gary Thomas]

I'm trying to run emacs inside of devshell.  For some reason,
emacs can't find my startup files (emacs configuration).  When
I look, I see very different startup behaviour for emacs when
I'm running in devshell vs. my normal shell (bash).  Inside
the devshell it seems to be totally lost and I get messages
like "User gthomas has no home directory".  Indeed when running
in the devshell, I can see that emacs is trying to access paths
like this:
   /usr/share/emacs/23.2/site-lisp/~gthomas/.emacs.elc

What's even more odd is that emacs does manage to find _some_
of the correct files such as
   /home/gthomas/.emacs.d/auto-save
   /home/gthomas/.emacs.d/auto-save-list

Any idea why the confusion?

I'd really like to have emacs behave properly within devshell :-)
I can only imagine what else might be "weird" under the covers
while using devshell...

Thanks

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
Gary Thomas                 |  Consulting for the
MLB Associates              |    Embedded world
------------------------------------------------------------