Subject: Re: bug#67687: Feature request: automatic tags management

From: Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 30 Dec 2023 15:25:57 -0800

Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]> writes:

> On 30/12/2023 22:31, Stefan Kangas wrote:
>
>> Would it be helpful to put that explanation in the .dir-locals.el file
>> itself?
>
> .dir-locals.el already usually hosts per-project settings. And most
> users of this feature probably aren't going to read Emacs's one.

I was mostly thinking about us poor Emacs maintainers, but either way is
fine by me.

> Yeah, it's hardly an innovation, more like in the "why don't we have
> this yet" department. But while automatic indexing has been around for a
> while, having it OOtB in lightweight editors wasn't commonplace. So as I
> recall it for ST3 (first beta in 2013, release in 2017) it was a
> meaningful step forward. The complex IDEs already had this for a long
> time, of course (but each was more specialized, and worked with a
> smaller number of languages).

OK, that's interesting, as far as text editor history goes.

Still, I'm hesitant to give them too much acknowledgement for what
basically amounts to no longer being among the worst in class.  As you
say, IDEs have already been doing this type of thing for a long time.
Sublime Text is non-free software too, which doesn't do much to make me
happier about mentioning their name.

But if you think it's a useful piece of history, then by all means let's
keep it.  Perhaps it could be moved to a separate history section rather
than the introductory paragraph, though?  It's your call.

>> Indeed, the possible confusion with eglot could bear some documenting.
>> Perhaps we should add a new paragraph to the commentary explaining how
>> this feature will (or will not) interact with Eglot.
>
> Suggestions welcome. I'm not sure how to phrase that without mentioning
> etags, tags files, and xref backends (in general and the names of
> specific ones).

The most pressing thing to explain, I think, is what happens if you run
both this mode and eglot.  Users will want to run the global mode but
still use eglot for some projects.

I don't really have a concrete suggestion, as I don't have a clear idea
of how it works.  :-)  But I think eglot will just take over and the
etags stuff will be ignored, no?