Subject: bug#19468: 25.0.50; UI inconveniences with M-.

From: Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2015 03:24:03 +0300

On 04/28/2015 02:19 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:

>> The idea here is to group candidates belonging to different
>> files together.

    ^^^ to the same file, sorry.

> That makes a lot of sense when the candidates are equally likely to be
> The One that the user's looking for.  In the case of etags I think the
> problem comes from the substring matching it uses.

etags puts some effort into returning the candidates in the most 
plausible way. Should we ignore that? etags--xref-find-definitions tries 
to honor it, at least according to the comment.

Further, xref-find-apropos will return a lot of candidates, and that 
will be what the user wants.

> Can't etags do better than substring matching and only return matches
> that actually have the requested name (and maybe fallback on substring
> matching if there's no exact match)?

I don't know if this problem is solvable in a generic way.

How reliable is tag-exact-match-p? We could, for instance, filter out 
all non-exact matches when we're just looking for definitions.