Re: Blunderbuss ".dir-locals.el" raises everything in its path!!

[Davis Herring]

>> I don't think it's a feature that dir-locals.el takes precedence over
>> mode-hooks (it's more of an accident that we consider sufficiently
>> harmless not to fix it, especially since a fix would probably be
>> difficult/inconvenient/buggy), but in this case it seems to provide just
>> the behavior we want.  I mean we do want to "impose" the GNU style in
>> our files, no matter what the user usually prefers.
>>
>> What am I missing?
>
> That setting space-before-funcall in c-cleanup-list is a very
> reasonable thing to do in the context of the GNU-style (why isn't it
> on by default for GNU?), and in no way breaks the imposed style.  But
> the old ways of doing that in the Emacs source tree doesn't work
> anymore, and there is nothing in NEWS, and AFAIK, no discussion about
> it has taken place.  It is just one of those frustrating
> WTF-discoveries.

That's the specific case that started this, yes.  But I think the general
point (that Stephen has made) bears another statement: the variable
`c-file-style' controls both things that ought to be the decision of a
project (like indentation and brace placement) and things that ought to be
the decision of each individual user (like what sort of cleanup to do
automatically).  Once we realize that, the problem is obvious: that
coupling of choices (that are properly made by different people) prevents
_any_ order of precedence from being correct.

There is the separate issue that .dir-locals.el is harder to notice than
true file-local variables, and so confusion is likely when it does
unexpected things (like this).  The proposed addition to the output of C-h
v would go a long way towards fixing that; my implementation suggestion is
to have `hack-local-variables' make (buffer-local) lists `file-locals' and
`dir-locals' of symbols that have been made local for the appropriate
reason.  (Of course, a later `setq' or `kill-local-variable' can render
these lists inaccurate.  The latter doesn't matter, since C-h v would see
that it wasn't local anyway.  The lists could contain their original local
values as well to detect the former case.)

Davis

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