Re: updated emacs configuration

On 06/13/2013 09:27 PM, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> I think the suggested emacs configuration snippets in
> src/tools/editors/emacs.samples no longer represent current best
> practices. I have come up with some newer things that I'd like to
> propose for review.
>
> First, I propose adding a .dir-locals.el file to the top-level directory
> with basic emacs settings. These get applied automatically. This
> especially covers the particular tab and indentation settings that
> PostgreSQL uses. With this, casual developers will not need to modify
> any of their emacs settings.
>
> (In the attachment, .dir-locals.el is called _dir-locals.el so that it
> doesn't get lost. To clarify, it goes into the same directory that
> contains configure.in.)
>
> With that, emacs.samples can be shrunk significantly. The only real
> reason to keep is that that c-offsets-alist and (more dubiously)
> sgml-basic-offset cannot be set from .dir-locals.el because they are not
> "safe". I have also removed many of the redundant examples and settled
> on a hook-based solution.
>
> I think together this setup would be significantly simpler and more
> practical.

The idea is a very good one in principle, but my short experiment with
the provided .dir-locals.el didn't give me BSD style brace indentation.
It works if we can do those "unsafe" things, but then we surely don't
want to have a user prompted to accept the settings each time. If
.dir-locals.el won't do what we need on its own, it seems to me hardly
worth having.

cheers

andrew