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

From: Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2015 05:15:04 +0300

On 04/28/2015 04:25 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> Yes, we've been through that, indeed.  But it can be accomodated by
> requiring the user to explicitly say that some TAGS file covers "these
> and these extra directory trees" or to link TAGS file together.

Well, that's a bigger project than the 4-line patch you've suggested, 
and it requires manual intervention from the user. You suggested it 
before too, and I don't remember Eli being very enthusiastic.

> The automatic suggestion could be restricted to only come about when
> there is a TAGS file in one of the parent dirs.

That won't help when I'm inside Emacs sources; I still don't want to use 
tags for Elisp.

> Could be.  But etags has been around for a long time and was the only
> "standard feature" of the kind until very recently in Emacs, so I think
> it's fair to assume that there are more such users out there.

etags might be popular (so some sort a general solution might be 
welcome), but that doesn't mean it's used with Elisp a lot.

For instance, if we consider Debian-like distributions, 
https://packages.debian.org/jessie/all/emacs24-el/filelist does not 
include the TAGS file. I don't think the C sources are generally 
included in the binary distributions.

And if we're just talking about Emacs developers, I wonder why nobody 
else spoke up on emacs-devel or in this bug yet.