On Sun, 2013-06-23 at 16:37 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> I'm un-thrilled with this as well, though for a slightly different
> reason: we have a policy that the PG sources should be tool agnostic,
> and in fact removed file-local emacs settings awhile back because of
> that.
We don't want to keep the tool settings in the sources, but what's wrong
with keeping them next to the sources? We have
src/tools/editor/emacs.samples already. This just moves some of the
contents to .dir-locals.el, where it would be more useful.
> Even though I use emacs, I would much rather keep such settings
> in my personal library. (TBH, I keep enable-local-variables turned
> off, and would thus get no benefit from the proposed file anyhow.)
No one is required to use this, and seasoned hackers aren't exactly the
target audience anyway.
> Another thing I'm not too happy about is that the proposed patch
> summarily discards the information we had about how to work with older
> emacs versions. I'm not sure it will actually break anybody's setup,
> but that would depend on whether .dir-locals.el was added before or
> after the last round of rewriting of c-mode.
I think you are confusing two separate changes. The proposed addition
of .dir-locals.el is entirely optional. (Well, I have removed the Perl
settings from emacs.samples. We can keep them if disabling local
variables is a wide-spread practice.) The C mode settings in the new
emacs.samples file are just as functional as the old ones, except they
are arguably better.