Subject: bug#76322: Make ctags a thin wrapper around etags

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2025 14:11:11 +0200

> From: Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]>
> Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2025 16:14:13 -0400
> Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked]
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
> >> More radically, Emacs could also stop installing etags, and advise
> >> people to run ctags -e instead, where this is the other ctags.
> >
> > To this I object, since the master source of the format of the TAGS
> > files must be in Emacs, and what better to document this format than
> > to maintain and distribute etags the program.
> 
> As a counter-point, we distribute parsers for quite a few formats where
> the master source of the format is not in emacs.git.  They don't usually
> have the same legacy as ctags, admittedly.
> 
> How about adding a --without-ctags flag, for those of us that never have
> a need for it?

Is that worth the extra maintenance headaches?

If we think our ctags is not being used (I suggested to query a few
distros about that), I'd rather drop it entirely, first by adding the
--ctags option to etags, and later maybe removing the ctags-only code
from etags.c.