Subject: Re: bug#26181: Remove etags

From: Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2017 18:45:09 +0200

On 21.03.2017 17:42, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> The latter might mean learning to use the ctags output (Vim format).
> 
> You mean, if we want to support tools beyond Universal ctags?

Not what I meant.

> (Because the latter supports Emacs-compatible TAGS output.) 

It officially does, but if etags is no more, the TAGS format has no 
reference implementation, and thus becomes less relevant and harder to 
conform to.

The Vim tags format is clearly more important to a program like ctags, 
so we might want to get to supporting that. It's also more rich, IIUC.

> Yes, if
> we want to support other tools, we'd need to extend etags.el or rely
> on external packages for parsing their tags tables.  E.g. GNU Global
> doesn't support TAGS format even as an option, AFAIK.

True. For Global, I think the vast majority of code in etags.el becomes 
irrelevant.