Future of ctags and etags in XEmacs

[Dr. Volker Zell]

>>>>> Hans de Graaff writes:

    > 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.

On cygwin at least we bundle them separately in a xemacs-tags package:

/usr/bin/ctags.exe
/usr/bin/etags.exe
/usr/share/man/man1/ctags.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/etags.1.gz
/usr/share/doc/Cygwin/xemacs-tags-21.4.20.README

But there is still the collision with the Exuberant ctags package :-(

    > Kind regards,

    > Hans de Graaff
    > Gentoo XEmacs maintainer

Ciao
  Volker
  Cygwin XEmacs maintainer