Subject: bug#20629: 25.0.50; Regression: TAGS broken, can't find anything in C++ files.

From: Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 30 May 2015 17:44:25 +0300

On 05/30/2015 05:21 PM, Francesco Potortì wrote:

> Ex-ctags
> generates new-style ctags tags and can recurs directories, both of which
> would be easy to implement in Etags.

It seems the users interested in this feature go on to simply use 'ctags 
-e'. I know I did, a while ago.

> When I compared them, more than ten years ago, the quality of generated
> tags were comparable.  I don't know if things have changed in the
> meantime, but I don't think that they have changed a lot.  The code of
> Ex-ctags is much more structured and, at a first sight, readable.
> However, I have never tried to go deeply into it, so I don't know if, in
> fact, it is really easier to manage.

Ex-ctags supports 41 language (by the last count at 
http://ctags.sourceforge.net/languages.html, maybe more now), etags 
supports 26.

The version at https://github.com/fishman/ctags also supports delegation 
to external parsers (see the --xcmd argument and 
https://github.com/fishman/ctags/blob/master/docs/xcmd.rst).

> So "merging" would mean, in fact, to have the communities managing them
> agree on one of them and improve it so that it becomes a superset of the
> other, then officielly declare the other one as deprecated.

Indeed.