Re: etags test is broken on MS-Windows

["Francesco Potortì" <pot@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii:
>> From: Andreas Schwab <schwab@linux-m68k.org>
>> Cc: pot@gnu.org,  eggert@cs.ucla.edu,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Sat, 23 May 2015 20:46:04 +0200
>> 
>> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> 
>> >> From: Andreas Schwab <schwab@linux-m68k.org>
>> >> Cc: pot@gnu.org,  eggert@cs.ucla.edu,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> >> Date: Sat, 23 May 2015 19:27:43 +0200
>> >> 
>> >> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> >> 
>> >> > So etags is only required to produce approximately correct byte
>> >> > positions, and it does that well enough.
>> >> 
>> >> If you want approximate positions then a line-column pair would be
>>                ^^^^^^^^^^^
>> >> better.
>> >
>> > How do you define a column count?
>> 
>> It doesn't matter.
>
>If you count bytes from the beginning of line, then yes, the accuracy
>should be better that way.  However, I wonder whether the format of
>TAGS, which assumes file offsets, is a de-facto standard by now.

In fact it is.  The format has not changed in at least 20 years, etags
has always been available for all platforms and it could be used outside
of Emacs.  For a format that old, changing it for no other reason than
elegance is probably not a good idea.