Re: Add a separate mode for .dir-locals.el

[Clément Pit-Claudel]

On 2019-10-17 11:45, Yuri Khan wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Oct 2019 at 21:57, Clément Pit-Claudel <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>> Flymake in ELisp mode is configured from emacs-lisp-mode, by adding two 
>> checkers to flymake-diagnostic-functions.  We could change that code to only 
>> add the hooks if the file name is not .dir-locals.el, but that seems less 
>> clean than creating a separate mode for .dir-locals.el files, since they 
>> aren't proper Emacs Lisp files.
> 
> .dir-locals.el is not the only kind of an .el file that is not proper
> Emacs Lisp code. Many modes store persistent data in the user’s
> .emacs.d, in files ending in .el. Only some of those (e.g. recentf)
> take extra steps to make that data valid code. Most just dump a data
> structure and call it a day.
> 
> Maybe there should be a base major mode for S-expression files, and
> emacs-lisp-mode, along with every other lisp-like mode, deriving from
> that?

Yes, that would be great. As far as I'm concerned, there's no reason to call 
these files .el, since most of the emacs-lisp-mode tools are not appropriate on 
such files.