Re: per-file (or, really, per buffer) allowing/disallowing code block execution

[Fedja Beader <fedja@protonmail.ch>]

Hello Richard, Ihor and Steven,

I'm aware that file-local variables exist, but it seems that
all documentation for them put them *into the file*, which is not secure for files downloaded from the internet. What is to stop a malicious file from setting an "yes, execute me automatically" variable?

Anyway, the point of my email was to suggest a change to org-mode such that it provides a pleasant out-of-the-box user experience for people like me. I want to use org-mode as a python/octave/R/whatever interactive notebook without having to spend several days learning elisp and the internal workings of Emacs. I have spent these days, days that could be better (sorry!) used working on actual projects of mine. But I spent this time and the time to articulate what I want and to write these emails in the hope that I will be the last person having to do so. I would also like to suggest org-mode to other people instead of Jupyter notebook without having to add "oh, btw, you might want to add these three pages of alien code to your init.el to make it usable".

To go a bit further off-thread, this change might seem unnecessary. However, the other changes I want is also auto-executing all modified code blocks on file save and/or when the cursor moves out of it, auto-executing dependent blocks when their dependency changes (e.g. blocks full of constants) or marking blocks as stale. But I will make suggestions to improve these things in later emails, once I know what I want.

Hello Greg,

Agreed, just yesterday I must have pressed C-c C-c "yes" three times a minute evaluating an embedded Octave script. The current default configuration is not pleasant at all.

Hello Ihor,

> Then, what about the following:
> 1. Set org-confirm-babel-evaluate globally to t
> 2. In the files you maintain, you can always put
>    file-local/directory-local value of org-confirm-babel-evaluate to
>    nil.
> 3. We can modify org-babel-confirm-evaluate _function_ to accept four
>    possible answers: yes, no, yes for all in buffer, no for all in
>    buffer. The extra 2 options will set buffer-local value of
>    org-confirm-babel-evaluate in the current Emacs session

Don't know about option (1), (2) seems insecure at first glance, for the reasons mentioned above. (3) sounds good (yes/no/always/never?) and what I want.