Dear Maintainer,

*** Reporter, please consider answering these questions, where
appropriate ***

    * What led up to the situation?

Via the emacs customize variable interface, a new value is saved via
automated modification of init.el.

    * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
      ineffective)?

It was ineffective for me to assign a group to init.el via $ chown
:special-group init.el.

    * What was the outcome of this action?

The ownership group assigned to init.el reverts to the user (or possibly
the group of its enclosing folder).

    * What outcome did you expect instead?

I expected emacs to preserve the group ownership of any preexisting file
it modifies (recreates and replaces).

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