Re: etags name collision.

[Ergus <spacibba@aol.com>]

Hi Stefan:

I totally agree with you in everything here and this was actually the
reason to start this thread.

There are two points here:

1) We are talking about the ctags executable, not about the etags
one... emacs does not use such ctags executable at all and it is
compiled and installed unconditionally.

2) About etags IMHO, if we could support "Exhuberant/Universal ctags"
(even if not enabled by default) is a much better solution in the long
path and an important step because it will save us to maintain and
support all the languages that they already maintain but also in a
better way.  Even no so weird languages like C++ or some very popular
ones like Rust have very poor or null support in etags, the database
creation needs to filter files manually and it is sadly useless for
tramp users that frequently have ctags in remote hosts but not etags or
emacs.

>
>BTW, regarding the state of our `ctags` compared to the other ones.
>A few years back I remember someone comparing them and finding out that
>we support fewer languages but that for some of those languages we
>provided better results.  If that's not the case any more, maybe we
>should check to see if we could make `etags.el` use "Exhuberant ctags"
>when available so as to benefit from the better tool.
>
I am not sure when such comparison was made but at the moment Universal
Ctags is very powerful and modular and superior Compared with
"Exhuberant ctags".  It works pretty well as backend for other programs
like gtags; adding external modules of backends is relatively easy, so
it is in constant development and active... You just need to give a look
to their repository:

https://github.com/universal-ctags/ctags

>
>        Stefan
>
vim users get this working out of the box for all the languages while we
have very poor support for it.