GNU bug report logs - #76322
Make ctags a thin wrapper around etags

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From: Richard Stallman <rms <at> gnu.org>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
Cc: 76322 <at> debbugs.gnu.org, eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu
Subject: bug#76322: Make ctags a thin wrapper around etags
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:18:20 -0400

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i wrote etags very early in development of GNU, starting from ctags
which I did not write.  At that time, I considered it unclean for a
program to behave differently depending on the name it is invoked
with.  The idea was that a user could give the program any name,
and it would still behave the same.

Back then, there was a reason to have ctags and etags, making their
different formats.  etags output had rough source locations which sped
up finding a definition in the source.

Nowadays that speedup may be insignificant in practice.

Is it still beneficial?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

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