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

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Message #72 received at 76322 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
Cc: 76322 <at> debbugs.gnu.org, rms <at> gnu.org, Stefan Kangas <stefankangas <at> gmail.com>
Subject: Re: bug#76322: Make ctags a thin wrapper around etags
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2025 10:01:38 -0700

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

On 2025-03-11 05:11, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 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.

That would be simpler, yes. Proposed patch attached.

My impression is that distros generally prefer Universal Ctags these 
days, though you can use Exuberant Ctags if you're old-fashioned or 
Emacs ctags if your even older-fashioned. On Fedora, 'ctags' is 
Universal Ctags; on Ubuntu all three variants are available as options 
and /usr/bin/ctags is a symlink to /etc/alternatives/ctags which in turn 
can link to /usr/bin/ctags-universal or /usr/bin/ctags-exuberant or 
/usr/bin/ctags.emacs.

To some extent it's a chicken-and-egg problem: if we keep shipping ctags 
some distros will keep making it available as an option. But there's no 
real need for us to keep maintaining the third (and oldest) variant.

[0001-Remove-ctags-program.patch (text/x-patch, attachment)]

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