I don't personally want to save those dir-locals as trusted in my emacs config.

why not?

Well for one, I shouldn't have to change my emacs config and enable emacs features I don't care about to be able to productively contribute to nixpkgs. That's a silly thing to annoy any drive-by or first-time contributor with.

Also, my emacs config file is not writable, so I can't just get emacs to do it for me. I just home-manager to install the file from my dotfiles repo so it's a symlink to the nix store.

The most valuable part of this for newbies is the indentation width, which is already covered by editorconfig.

13:21 <gchristensen> elvishjerricco: what features does it turn on that you don't want?
13:23 <elvishjerricco> gchristensen: It's not that I'm vehemently opposed to the feature it turns on. It's just that I don't care about it, so I'd rather not have it cluttering my emacs file, plus I can't automatically add it anyway. And seeing "You must modify your emacs config to contribute to this repo" is a big annoyance to drive-by/first-time contributors=
13:23 <gchristensen> why must you modify your emacs config?
13:23  * gchristensen isn't _trying_ to be dense :)
13:24 <elvishjerricco> gchristensen: Because it's insanely frustrating to have every new buffer (including minor ones like magit UIs) also pop up this prompt "Would you like to save these things?"
13:25 <elvishjerricco> You can't tell it to *stop* asking (nor should you have to)
13:25 <gchristensen> elvishjerricco: I think I'm missing something, and I'm trying to understand what it is I'm missing -- not challenging that it is a frustrating experience
13:25 <gchristensen> elvishjerricco: dir-locals doesn't get dynamically loaded, but is instead appended to your emacs init.el or whatever?
13:26 <elvishjerricco> gchristensen: emacs asks if you'd like to apply the variables in every new buffer you open. Then, if you'd like it to stop prompting, your only option is to tell it to write to your emacs config that you trust these particular variables, so it'll open new buffers (and use the enabled features) without the prompt.
13:26 <gchristensen> ahh it has to write the trust status
13:27 <elvishjerricco> So with magit, you press one key per action you're trying to take. Each key you press opens this prompt
13:27 <gchristensen> makes sense

cc @matthewbauer who added this in July

FTR I was also annoyed by this new file because every time it asked me about these variables was not the time for me to review this file.
In the Coq project, we have decided to get rid of such .dir-local.el and instead provide a coqdev.el file that people can choose to load.
In Nix, there is indeed the EditorConfig file already for which I have installed the Emacs package (although I'm not quite sure what it does).

Sorry about this. They were all safe local variables so it is pretty normal to have them set (Nix has done it for a while: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/blob/master/.dir-locals.el). Do you also have issues in that?

This can be configured with enable-local-variables but IIRC it defaults to t.

Was there a specific one that was tripping up? I do recall bug-reference-bug-regexp being made safe only in 26.1 it could have been a problem in Emacs 25.

It could be indeed:

$ emacs --version
GNU Emacs 25.3.1

I'm using the version of Emacs that is distributed with NixOS 18.03. I see that 18.09 has just released though so I'll probably be upgrading very soon. What about you @ElvishJerricco?

Sorry about that! Yeah since emacs 25 is still in 18.03 it definitely shouldn't be forgotten about. Anyway bug-reference-regexp is not all that useful so it's fine to leave .dir-locals.el off for now.

Oh so there will be no prompting with emacs 26, even if I've never purposefully saved the locals? If that's the case, perhaps we can add this back after giving 18.09 some time for adoption. I'm still on 18.03 (emacs 25).