Re: files.el: Patch to make project-settings optional/customizable

[Dan Nicolaescu <dann@ics.uci.edu>]

Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org> writes:

  > > So there are 2 uses .dir-locals.el 3 lines apart in the same 24 lines function.
  > > The defconst adds 4 lines.  It's hard to keep a straight face and claim
  > > that the defconst is a good idea.
  > > (and the 2 uses could be reduced to a single one if we make
  > > locate-dominating-file return an expanded file name -- which seems to be
  > > a good idea anyway).
  > >
  > > It's kind of painful that this discussion is still going on, it should
  > > have never occurred in the first place...
  > 
  > I can't believe we have this kind of discussion :(

Yeah, it could have been avoided by not adding the defconst, which is
quite obvious by now that was only added to circumvent the fact that the
settings file name should not be changeable by the user.  And that is
not just a whim, it's an issue of robustness and quality of
implementation.

More, adding the defconst does not fix any bug, so it shouldn't have
been done at this point.

Even more, it does cost something: the pure size increases by 28 bytes,
and the data size of emacs by 8K (might have hit a page boundary
condition). 

As shown by the actual code, it is more lines of code, so it is not
simplifying anything.  But it does make it easy to break the feature.

So please revert that change.