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

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From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
To: rms <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 17:40:51 +0200

> From: Richard Stallman <rms <at> gnu.org>
> Cc: eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu, 76322 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
> Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:18:20 -0400
> 
> 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?

Emacs doesn't use the output of ctags.  All our tags-related commands
use on the TAGS files produced by etags.  So dropping ctags will lose
Emacs nothing.

AFAIR, the ctags output is used by other editors (Vim, I think?).
Whether that, or the fact that we shipped ctags since forever, is a
significant enough reason to keep it in the tree and in the tarballs,
is another question.  Maybe we should ask downstream distros how they
feel about dropping ctags.

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