Yeah, people can just override the default but I wonder how many people will be surprised. I've been experimenting with .project.el files that indicate common project contents that span different directory hierarchies, basically a .project.el that sets a ("safe") variable so I can try to get tooling to look across file systems rather than just assume one base. Still working through that to gauge its utility vs. support tooling complexity.

On Sat, Oct 12, 2024 at 4:30 PM Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev> wrote:

On 12/10/2024 17:32, Ship Mints wrote:
> If you're really serious about this, I'd like to suggest ".project.el"
> or "project.el" over an unadorned ".project" to avoid clashing with
> third-party software that uses .project files or directories for its own
> purposes.

It's probably not going to be an Elisp file (with some code inside).

And it's been mentioned in this thread that some other software uses
file with this name in the project root. If there is data indicating
that such dirs should not be recognized as project root in many other
cases, we should of course reconsider. But from what I've seen in
threads on Reddit and relater articles, people like this particular file
name for this purpose.