Future of ctags and etags in XEmacs

[Hans de Graaff]

Hi,

Recently an old Gentoo bug [1] was revived about a file collision between 
Exuberant ctags [2] and XEmacs and GNU Emacs. All of these applications 
try to install /usr/bin/ctags and would overwrite each other's binaries. 
We are currently discussing strategies to solve this issue, but I thought 
I'd raise the issue here as well.

My current understanding, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that:
Exuberant ctags is more featureful (e.g. supports more languages) than 
the version shipped with XEmacs, and
Exuberant ctags is not a full drop-in replacement for ctags in XEmacs.

>From a distribution point of view the preferred solution would be to 
unbundle ctags from XEmacs and let people decide (with the distro 
providing a default) which ctags implementation to use. This would 
certainly solve our problem. I'd be happy to explore other solutions as 
well, and additional insight into this situation would be helpful.

Kind regards,

Hans de Graaff
Gentoo XEmacs maintainer


1. https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29398
2. http://ctags.sourceforge.net/